


[Meta] Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles

by fresne



Category: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Genre: Episode Related, Episode Review, Gen, Meta
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2008-06-11
Updated: 2014-06-13
Packaged: 2018-02-04 07:03:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 24,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1770001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fresne/pseuds/fresne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>These were written as the series was on-going and published on the Firefox news (no affiliation with firefox) site. I've been toying for awhile with putting them here.</p>
    </blockquote>





	1. [Meta] 1.1 Pilot

**Author's Note:**

> These were written as the series was on-going and published on the Firefox news (no affiliation with firefox) site. I've been toying for awhile with putting them here.

When I first heard that Fox was doing a new Terminator series, I thought two things. 1) Please don't suck. 2) Please don't cancel it after three episodes.

Fox is capricious, but really Sarah Connor had me with, "One bag, plus the guns. I'll make pancakes." Lena Headey (Queen of Sparta - 300) does a credible job as Sarah Connor. Rather than going with Linda Hamilton's nuclear-crazy intensity, which would have been hard to maintain for a series, she dials back from eleven to a livable seven. We begin several years after the events of T2, which Sarah hopes prevented the robot apocalypse. Now she's waiting tables, getting engaged, letting herself slip into a near neighbor of a normal life. Thomas Dekker as John Connor (not gay Zach - Heroes), teenage maybe-savior would seem to have done some reading on what typically happens to saviors and wants none of it. Summer Glau (River - Firefly/Serenity) as the good Terminatrix rounds out the cast. As a diehard Browncoat, she was just one more reason to program the DVR to, "Yes, please." Then there were explosions and killer robots and time travel paradoxes. Gotta a love me a time travel story.

Actually, before we get too far into a review of the pilot, I really should mention: Previously on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles - it may be the pilot, but there were three movies.  
~Terminator in which Sarah Connor had eighties hair, a machine and a Kyle-Reese-daddy-to-be traveled back in time, blew things up, knocked the mother of humanity's savior up, and got blown up.  
~Terminator 2: Rise of the Machine in which said mother, Sarah Connor/Linda Hamilton, was so awesome that an entire generation of violent little girls went squee. Oh, and Arnold said, "Hasta la vista," and "I'll be back." And they all blew things up. It was awesome.  
~Terminator 3: Judgment Day in which Arnold was back, but not Sarah Connor/Linda Hamilton (died of cancer/wouldn't do the movie), and is the movie that only I and about two other people (we have a secret handshake) liked. Oh and the world was blown up. But it's okay. John Connor is/was/will be ready to save humanity, because his mother was seven kinds of awesome and raised him right and was buried with guns. Lots and lots of guns.

I'm sure there will be plenty who disliked the pilot, but I did mention the secret T3 handshake right?

T:tSCC (I'm not typing it every time) is set between T2 and T3 and in 1999. In T2, we were told that the world would end in 1997 (yes, I have access to Wikipedia). We begin, two years later, in the downward slope to Y2K.

We begin the episode where we should. Where anyone who has watched the movies knows that we must. On the flickering flash of the yellow dividing line of a road at night. We begin with Sarah speaking to us in a voice over in what rapidly becomes clear is a dream. Sarah’s nightmare of could be. Fear of being found by the cops. By the terminators. By the future, which isn't written, but seems to be fairly persistent.

We begin with Sarah driving with the narrow crescents of her headlights illuminate some bare seconds into the future. While the more distant turns and curves of the road are hidden by the passing darkness. The sun flickers night and day, because if the pilot has one overriding theme, it's the passage of time.

We are told the dates, shown times, hear character’s ages, and always, the sun rises and sets over traveling cars and stationary skylines. This is a story about time travel after all. And dreams. And hope.

In her first voice over, Sarah tells us that a child in the womb shares his mother's dreams. That's why he reaches for her in his first moments. And everyone who saw the opening scene of T2 knows what Sarah's dreams have been for the last fifteen years.

She's thirty-three. John is fifteen. I'm not a mathematician, but that would make Sarah all of eighteen when her life changed from going out on dates into battle scars. Three years older than John is as this set of Chronicles opens.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles  
West Fork Nebraska, August 24th, 1999

Remember when we partied like it was 1999. There was Y2K and the end of the world. And yet, well, we “partied” like it was 1999 and the world didn’t end. I still have party supplies. Not that it was a safer world, but we perceived it to be safer.

As Sarah might say, "No one is ever safe." Perhaps John was right and Sarah packed them up with guns and pancakes because she was afraid of commitment. Perhaps, running alerted the authorities (and random Terminators). And yet, there was an FBI agent at the police station to take Dixon’s statement. Dixon and Agent Ellison both think that they know Sarah, but they don't. Not the fiancé who told her a secret. Not the Federal Agent who has read the truth, but didn’t believe it.

I find it telling though that in that two year period of relaxing into almost safe. Six whole months in a single spot, she took Kyle Reese's last name. When Agent Ellison entered it into the computer, it was for the first time, which makes me think it was the first time she used it. She slid it on her shoulders like a comfortable sweatshirt that she didn't want to take off in the next identity.

And I consider the dichotomy of the picture that Agent Ellison loaded into his computer of a smiling happy Sarah and her description, stab wounds and mental institutions.

But that was the last life, and the pilot was very quick to take us into the Connor’s next one.

Red Valley, New Mexico  
September 6th, 1999

August Summer has been put away. It’s September now and school is in session.

Somehow, I want to see some sort of significance that John meets Cameron (his good Terminator to be) in chemistry class, but I haven't come up with it yet. It is interesting that when Cameron introduces herself, she tells him about the father that she doesn't have (tractors - machines). He tells her about the boring father that he doesn't have (insurance - against the apocalypse)

When John goes home, Sarah is painting the walls green. I'd say it's symbolic of growing things, but it's a pretty puke green. Mostly I'm interested in the symbolism of slapping on a thin coat of paint to conceal the weapons she’s hidden in the walls.

While for John it's all about once more being the outsider. In a hick town, he’s somehow slapped on the wrong paint/the wrong clothes and is surrounded by old computers.

When he looked up at her - spouted a line about the rules being written on the inside of his eyeballs - for a moment, all I could think was that John has Sarah's eyes. They're both pale green. Like the walls. Except more pretty(er), and less puke.

But nowhere is safe. The FBI flew in. The Terminator arrived. They both found them (would find them - tenses are the first victim of time travel) because Sarah didn't want to shed being Sarah Reese. Didn't want to have to be someone else. Again.

Just when things were going so well for John. Having a moment with a pretty girl. Opening up about his dead hero father. About his uptight mom.

In many ways the pilot doesn't make any allowances for the viewer who is not familiar with the first two movies. When John Connor says that his father was a soldier who died in battle, that only really means something if you know who that father was. If you know that Kyle Reese was sent back in time by John himself. That future John who apparently keeps (kept, will keep) lobbing people into the past. Hoping that the future isn't/wasn't written. Except the parts that are really persistent. Like puke green paint under your finger nails.

Like a Terminator with a gun in its leg. Here I'll pause, because really, why a gun in its leg? Okay, it's cool, but it's not like it's a disruptor cannon in his leg. It's a pistol. Seventeen day waiting period, unless you're a killing machine with a dry sense of humor. Class dismissed.

As John jumped out the window, we have almost a replay of Sarah's opening dream. Except this time, the Terminator tracked with his red gaze, did the trademark inevitably inexorably walking forward past the stop sign and wham - there's the Glauinator (or Rivernator or Summernator or... it'll take fandom a few days to settle on a name) with a truck.

She says the line that she has to say. That's as inevitable as day following night. "Come with me if you want to live." Really, far more than any other line, this is the mantra of the Terminator stories. There's always one more threat and one more protector. Sucks to be John. Savior of mankind and all that, always having to run away. Sucks to be his mother, but she's more into repression. And guns.

When John called his mother, and the Terminator said, "I love you, John," he knew it wasn't her. Because something as simple as "I love you" isn't how she shows it.

Then we have my favorite scene in the episode. A male terminator (if they can be said to have a gender) pretending to be a woman, a mother. A female terminator (if she can be said to be a she) pretending to be a boy, a son.

It's a neat trick. So is the slamfest that follows. Inexorable machines and Kevlar chairs. Seriously, I love my couch, but I love that Sarah did that. Hid guns in the walls and made her furniture something to hide behind.

Then they ran. We are reminded once more of the road, of time, as a truck entirely unrelated to the plot - as far as I can tell - sailed down the highway. At least it looked cool.

While the teenage hero-to-be slept, the cute killing machine sewed herself up without a bra on. She's a different kind of Terminator. For one thing she eats (potato) chips.

She's from 2027, two years before Kyle Reese was sent back in time (and yes, again with the Wikipedia). Now the robot apocalypse will arrive on April 19, 2011. Similarly to T3’s plotline, it was not stopped by the events of T2, just delayed. Like a terminator, who would have found them anyway. They always do.

When John begged his mother to change the future, to create a world where he can live as just someone, no one important, that's when we see Sarah’s love. Not in "I love yous", but in, "Alright. I'll stop it." She promises to repaint those inexorable yellow dashes down the road and save him from his future. Although, mind you, that generally causes accidents.

Then it’s the past/the future. September 9th, 1999.

They arrive at the Dyson Residence, where a little boy calls for his mother. He's another child whose father died in battle, who will never really know him. Heroes. Dead men.

The mothers are left behind to shove their way through the rubble. Or, you know, a robot could blow up a truck. Again. Which is something I appreciate about robots. We both like explosions.

However, as the first movie promised, Terminators don't feel. After being blown up, he whirs and gets up. Then again, when Sarah was injured, she bled, but kept going until she had time to feel.

And Sarah feels so much. "I'll lose my boy. He'll leave me."

When John told Cameron that he was all his mother had, he was right. It's just, he didn’t complete that sentence. She’s all he has too. It’s just at this point, he's fifteen. He thinks his mother is sort of immortal. That she can change the future. Sarah knows that she isn’t. That she might not be able to.

While outside, the sun rises over the city. And it's day. 7:52 a.m.

Off to a bank. Into the vault. We see through Cameron's eyes for the first time. She sees in regular color and not red at all. She gives them keys, always nicely symbolic, and parts that make a gun. I love the idea that while time travelers can bring no weapons from the future, there are two approaches to that. Send back beings that are the weapon. Send back people with knowledge to make the weapons. Not to go too much into the Pandora's legend, but suffice to say, here, hope is contained in a safety deposit box. Hope created both by the future that sent the engineer back and the past, 1963. A year in which among other things(*) “The Feminine Mystique” was published, Martin Luther King Jr. told us that he had a dream, and Kennedy was assassinated.

While outside, Agent Ellison mulls the evidence and decides that he knows "Less and less all the time."

In one way our heroes are in a trapped room. Big old lock. No exit. And in another, they have infinite exits. And a mission. Find Skynet - stop running (moving, traveling) - fight. The gun turns red and they shoot the unstoppable force with their future gun from 1963 and next stop 2007. How soon it seems like the past. Time's like that.

There they are. Surrounded by fire and a ball of white light. Cars spinning out of control. Stark naked and running past a sign that tells us to expect delays. They are where it all begins. Where Skynet begins. This time.

They're safe.

No one is ever safe.

We end, exactly where we should, on a monologue. On a montage. They stood by swing sets, empty reminders of childhood, and got ready for the series to begin.

 

  
*Source: http://www.historycentral.net/dates/1963.html

 

www.terminatorfiles.com/  
www.lenaheadeysource.com/  
www.summer-glau.net/  
www.starmania.com/ThomasDekker/


	2. [Meta] 1.2 Gnothi Seauton or “I y’am what I y’am, whoever that is”

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On episode 2 of Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles (T:tSCC), we studied ancient Greek, friendship, betrayal and the meaning of mortality. Oh, and there was a large explosion with a metal skull sailing right at us.

On episode 2 of Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles (T:tSCC), we studied ancient Greek, friendship, betrayal and the meaning of mortality. Oh, and there was a large explosion with a metal skull sailing right at us.

I’m of two minds on the Terminator skull projectile. Okay, well, actually three minds.

The first mind thought it looked cool. “Fire pretty” and all that. We’ll call this the “Beer Bad”* mind and ignore it.

The second mind was a little irked. One of the core precepts of the time travel mechanism used in the Terminator universe is that only living tissue (or things surrounded in living tissue) can travel through time. Thus funny naked people streaking the landscape, but no one gets to have any microwave cannons or fusion grenades or whatever from the future.

Thus, it really doesn't make any sense that a metal head was shot forward in time.

But the third mind thinks that the appearance of the head makes wonderful symbolic sense and given a choice between logic (in a time travel story about the mother of the savior of human kind, who got pregnant after one time sex with a soldier from the future, while narrowly avoiding being killed by an unstoppable killing machine that was ultimately stopable) and symbolism, I'm always going to come down on the side of symbolism.

One of the most potent symbols of human mortality is a skull. The hollow eyes. The eternally grinning teeth. Used over and over in artwork to not just represent the dead individual (depressed Danish teenager Hamlet’s “Alas, poor Yorick” or the piles of skulls that Terminators crushingly walked over in the flashback scenes of T1), but the angel of death him/her/itself.

That’s what a Terminator is. The termination. The end. El Finito.

The moment that cold grinning skull is flung at the viewer, we know that this dead thing will not stay dead. The familiar black cat hisses at it. It may sit surrounded by human junk, but it is not safe. This dead thing comes back. Its eyes relight with red fire. In classic horror movie style, its arm reaches out from where its body is buried. Like the Headless horseman, it wears a dead man’s head, with milky staring eyes, until it can find its own.

Conceals itself in plain site and does that relentless search thing. Like time and mortality, because it knows itself and its purpose.

A Terminator will lie in a room pretending to be dead, surrounded by its victims. Waiting for the next target to come in. And when confronted by an unknown target, he/it runs away. Because the course of action isn’t defined. Only to return and watch again.

We see hints of that in Cameron as well. We, the viewers, are reminded that although Cameron looks cute, she is a killing machine. That moment when the police officer questions her, he thinks he has defined her. Asks her name, but she doesn’t have one. He thinks he can just look at her and define based on where she’s standing, who she is with, but he can’t.

He cannot know what danger he is in. Doing his job. Cannot know that Sarah saved him when she ran up and played the role of the cyborg’s mother. Cameron is someone who will shoot and kill an old man because she thinks he might have betrayed them. I’d say that’s because that’s who she is, but I don’t know that yet. I would guess that there are things that future-John programmed her to do that we don’t know yet. We, like the police officer, think we know who she is, but we don’t. Not yet.

Which in an episode called Gnothi Seauton, which means Know Thyself, is what it’s all about.

Who the characters are. How they know themselves. How they use that understanding to know each other.

In Enrique’s first scene, he tells us that because he knows Sarah, he is not surprised to see her. Sarah thinks she knows Enrique, but finds that his nephew, who seeks to learn Enrique’s secrets, knows him better than she does. Maybe. Perhaps.

Lacking the omniscient view of the audience, Sarah cannot know Enrique. Yells at Cameron for killing Enrique. For thinking that Cameron, a machine, knows Sarah, when Sarah does not know herself. Doesn’t know what she will do.

Sarah’s monologues on self knowledge bookend the episode.

In the beginning, she tells us that it is impossible for her to really know herself at all. In the last fifteen years, from the time of her late teens, she’s spent most of her time as someone else. Speaking different languages. Reading the Wizard of Oz (there’s no place like home) to her son over and over in Spanish. Wandering in different cultures. An outsider to herself. Perhaps, it is because she remembers being Sarah Connor full-time once-upon-a-time, its something she longs for between lives. The only time she gets to be that person. While John has never known anything other than exactly knowing who he is supposed to be.

It’s all mapped out and written. Unless the Terminators kill him first. For John, not having a new identity means being a statue. Being unmoving, trapped stone. Dead. He can only come to life again and move when he has a new name. Added to that, there must be some small release in letting go of being John Connor.

John Connor is the hero. John Reese/Baum/Whoever is just a teenager. A teenager, who in an odd way, his older self is a father figure to himself at 3rd remove. His father, as John “Baum” tells us, is always a hero. Always dead. He may as well be speaking of John Connor as Kyle Reese. From across the divide of time, older-John, sent someone to protect Sarah Connor. He sent back a companion/savior when John was ten. He sent back a pretty girl to save young-John when he’s fifteen. He sent back resistance fighters. He moved John in time. And then there’s the most important change. The significance to 2005 that John may never know.

John knows they have leaped form 1999 to 2007, but it’s a move with no real meaning other than time lag. The difficulty of adjusting to a new time without any new reference points to hold onto. There is a brief montage of him trying to define himself in the only method left available to him. What message he will leave on his voice mail, but even then, he cannot define himself. His real name. His destiny. Some bland recitation of, “You have reached.”

No wonder he wanders off in time-lag boredom to the mall. To see other people. Other teenagers. To try to reconnect with the world. Tries to vanity search himself and reads about his own death, because tick tock, Death is always around the corner.

That must be a startling thing.

Then he searches for Charley Dixon, his brief living father figure, the EMT. While Sarah Connor is positioned as the best fighter that John ever knew, Charley is a rescue worker. Someone who fights death and sometimes wins. John gives into the desire to revive that old life. To try to revive dead John Reese.

But that life is dead. The paper said so. Charley has moved on and married, and has a life, while John appears (naturally enough) exactly the same. How that plays out remains to be seen. John is after all, a teenager. He’s still defining the “himself” that he is trying to know.

Then again, so is Sarah.

She’s a mother. The episode is careful to point that out in several scenes. She tells John where food is. She looks at him and understands at a glance that he snuck out and did… something. She doesn’t need fancy Terminator abilities to tell that.

She’s a believer. Enrique said that his nephew wasn’t a believer. Clearly he's defining himself as a believer. Sarah as a believer, but exactly what they both believe isn’t clear.

She’s a fighter. The best fighter. Note, Cameron does not say that they jumped forward in time to save Sarah’s life. To bring her to a time when some new life saving technology exists that will prevent cancer, or even before the cancer started to grow. She says that it was to bring the best fighter that John knew to this key point in time in an attempt. But not before seeding the past with people to help them before, presumably, time-lag-paradox cut that time stream off.

She’s dead. The paper said so. The unknown cyborg Cameron said so too. Sarah died in 2005. Except she didn’t, but she still could. Because it wasn’t the best fighter kind of fight.

We end the episode where we began. With the Terminator reunited with his head. Red eyes glowing as he searches for the names and faces he was defined to kill.

We end with Sarah thinking about identity. She tells us that John, ever conscious of that sort of thing, once told her that “Know thyself and thou shalt know all the mysteries of the gods and of the universe.” Was written on a temple to Apollo. As if anyone who has ever studied Greek Mythology thinks that that particular set of gods had it together enough to know themselves.

In any case, Sarah defines it differently. She embraces only knowing herself, that person she never gets to be, because what else is there to know. When old friends cannot be trusted, even time can be manipulated, and the world that is all around her can and could crumble beneath the metal feet of the Terminators, who crush civilizations like so much bones. In a world where there are no constants, not even the past, especially not the future, she decides to rely only on love of family (the entirety of which is John) and the body God gave her, as she sits in an oncology lab and looks at her blood in a vial.

Because Terminators aren’t the only kind of death. But then, she is the fiercest fighter that John ever knew.

~~~~~  
I’d say the end, but some final thoughts, that didn’t really fit in the review. Did anyone else laugh when John recited his new background from Lawrence, Kansas, the hometown of Supernatural’s main characters?

 

*S4 - Beer Bad – “Fire Pretty” one of my most frequent Buffy quotes as opposed to the equally often used “Tree Pretty. Fire bad,” of S3 Graduation, which is elemental-ist against fire.


	3. [Meta] 1.3 "The Turk" or Looking into the Abyss, the flat eyed abyss looking back

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In episode 1.3, Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles (T:tSCC), John and Cameron went to a school with trompe d’oeil issues, Sarah got burningly close to a man with a Turk hobby, Agent Ellison got some non-sequitur clues, while Cromatry-Terminator continued his quest for self improvement. In other words, T:tSCC set up the plot elements for the rest of the season.

In episode 1.3, Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles (T:tSCC), John and Cameron went to a school with trompe d’oeil issues, Sarah got burningly close to a man with a Turk hobby, Agent Ellison got some non-sequitur clues, while Cromatry-Terminator continued his quest for self improvement. In other words, T:tSCC set up the plot elements for the rest of the season. 

The pace of each episode thus far has been slightly different. In a way, it has felt like the creators were spending the first two episodes getting the main characters to the right place. While the third episode set up questions, but didn’t provide a lot of answers.

Well, the episode may not present answers, but there are themes a’plenty, which begins with Sarah’s opening dream.

At first, the nuclear “fathers of our destruction” walked around her without seeing her, as she shot them. However, they only lie dead for a moment. First they rise from the dead, and then these genius humans became killing machines, who surrounded Sarah and shot her. This both touched on the theme of the narrow line between human and machine, and played with the imagery of Sarah creating her own destruction by trying to prevent it.

In this dream, Sarah tells us that when she was at the mental hospital, where she was held in T2, she became obsessed with science, no scientists, no the particular scientists who built the atom bomb.

By telling us about her interest in this way, it was as if Sarah was peeling away layers of skin to get to the truth of her interest. She was in that mental hospital for attempting to stop the creation of Skynet. She was without support, considered insane, and had lost her son. In that period of loss and failure, Sarah became "obsessed" with genius that could not stop itself from creating destruction and she wondered why no one else stopped them.

The answer to that question gets at the inherent impossibility of Sarah’s promise to John to stop Skynet from being created. In essence, she has promised to stop human progress. The reason no one stopped the creation of the atom bomb was there was a race to build it. Killing those scientists would not have prevented the bombs creation. Einstein, who John later parallels with a chess playing machine, had already theorized the foundational science behind the bomb.

Clearly, neither John nor Sarah ever watched an episode of James Burke’s “Connections”* series and so they do not realize that attempting to kill the headwaters of an idea is harder than it seems. An invention may be derived from multiple rivers of thought.

Episode 1.3 is called “The Turk,” which we were told by Andy Goode was a machine in the 1700s that played chess. This is not precisely accurate. The Turk was a hoax that played very good chess.**

The Turk was a box with the mannequin torso of a turbaned Turk that moved the chess pieces on the board. The insides were full of machinery, which could be seen by opening various panels. However, the most important part was the sliding chair where a human would sit inside the box, slide away from observer’s view, and play all those very good chess games.  
That inventors like Edmund Cartwright*** (power loom) and Charles Babbage (Difference Engine) saw the Turk and drew inspiration from it is one of those interconnected ideas things.

As Sarah woke from her dream, she looked at the papers assembled by the future-resistance fighters. Last week, she thought they were back in time to help John. This week, she thought they are a Skynet hunting party. I do wonder if like all the theories about the Turk, that won’t be wrong as well.

Then Cameron walked by in her underwear. Her skin is revealed to John’s admiring teen gaze, but that’s not the truth of what she is. Cameron walked like a machine, but her appearance fooled the eye. She drew makeup on her face with a pencil that was too blunt for brain surgery and that too was part of her disguise, paint/makeup that made her appear like “other” teenagers.

While there is a ST:TNG - Data-like quality to Cameron’s recitation of facts, the thing that struck me is that Cameron is both capable of being bored in her sleepless nights and alleviating that boredom through reading.

Then John and Cameron arrived at school and walked by the first of the trompe d’oeil frescos of a doorway. A trompe d’oeil is literally a painting that fools the eye into seeing something that isn’t there, which was par for the course in this episode.

When the metal detector beeped over Cameron’s metal infrastructure, John explained it as a metal plate. As this was a reasonable enough explanation, the guard waved them on. The truth wasn’t remotely reasonable.

Tarissa Dyson, visiting her husband’s grave, perceived a different sort of truth when she saw Sarah. As she said, Sarah is never dead and she always wants something. However, I’m also inclined to think that the yellow rose Sarah brought for Miles, a name which means soldier, wasn’t just a gesture. Sarah meant it when she said all deaths have meaning. The difficulty was that when Tessa asked the crucial question, if Andy the Goode would have to die, Sarah didn’t know the answer. It’s a classic moral question. If you could travel back in time and by killing X prevent y, would you do it? This episode spins the question by adding the caveat that not only is there no guarantee that killing X would prevent y, but it might even cause it.  
Thus far, we have seen machines that are programmed to kill and they stop at nothing to do that. We have seen machines that are programmed to protect a person and that is the person they protect. We have yet to see a machine that is complex enough to struggle with the choice of one or the other. Given the various deaths in the episode, Sarah’s statement that no death is in vane is interesting. Also, as Cameron later reminded us, people die all the time. Death won’t wait for Sarah’s say so.

Elsewhere in the plot, Agent Ellison continued to gather facts that made no sense. As he arrived at the flop where the resistance fighters were killed, a detective joked that Ellison had not been to a crime scene since Hoover was cross-dressing at Quantico. In this episode, even the jokes were in on the cross-dressing-trompe-d’oeil theme. Ellison resisted the detective’s easy answers and continued to look into the thickening plot. When confronted with blood with no red cells and a grown man with the finger prints of a four year old child, he kept looking.

He should. There are a lot of answers for him to find.

Cromarty-Terminator made a type-O withdrawal and a house call to a “bleeding” edge medical scientist, just as that scientist was talking about someone eighteen months ahead of the Germans. It may as well have been a monologue from WWII about the race to the atom bomb. The pen that Cromarty used to write the medical formula on the wall wasn’t sharp enough for brain surgery, but it was sharp enough to get the idea across. The medical scientist was so filled with excitement at the ideas that even when confronted with the truth of what Cromarty was, he closed the door on escape and continued the experiment with his wide eyes and tiny scalpel. Cromarty, true to his programming, took those wondering, wide eyes and overwrote formulas with blood on the wall.

Sarah didn’t have it so straight forward. Sarah followed one of the clues in that pile of Skynet hunting papers to Andy Goode.

As she prepared for her date with Andy the good man, she sat in the bath and shaved her legs. The drop of blood that splashed in the water looked like a nuclear cloud. It also looked like a drop of blood from a surface cut. “If you prick me, do I not leak.”**** As she sliced and soaked, she monologued the story of Mo Berg, an OSS agent, who was sent to see if Heisenberg and the Germans were close to building the bomb and if so, kill Heisenberg. Sarah told us that Mo had never killed anyone. What she didn’t say is that he made the choice not to kill Heisenberg.

Sarah spent the episode trying to make that decision about Andy. His version of the Turk is a machine with moods. Although, depending on how you look at it, the original Turk was a machine with moods.

What’s interesting about Andy’s description of Turk is that while he had a poster of Kasperoff versus Fritz, which shows a human hand versus a Termanoid one, he said that Fritz would have wiped the floor with Blue, as Kasperoff did Kramnick. He envisioned not a competition of machine against human, but machine against machine, just as humans compete against humans.

He was so dedicated to the idea of Turk, that going with the theme of eyes/loss of sight, he once went blind for three days. He had dedicated eight years of his life to creating the Turk, which if we count the years, is around when Sarah made her jump. He spent these years, coding as if from a dream, like the writing on the wall, because he wanted one day to communicate with his machine. He imagined conversation, not Singularity.

Sarah’s conversation with John about Andy’s creation displayed the first flashes of, "Oh, that John Connor,” with John’s questions about bandwidth, network access, etc. In the next moment, John reminded his mother of her promise to stop human progress. He actually asked his mother if she’d heard of the Singularity, the point machines don’t need us. I could take this as letting the audience know, but instead I’ll think of it as typical teenage self-absorption.

John was after all going to school with a fresco fetish. The paintings progressed from one of closed door to closed door with a painted bra hanging off a door handle, which sent one mystery girl into a tizzy.

In the bathroom, there were girls painting their faces with makeup called rash. Although Cameron had read the dictionary, their words had no contextual meaning. If they painted their faces with rash, bitch-whore could well mean anything. Cameron then offered the tight makeup to the crying-end-of-the-world-girl, because that’s what you do. She called her a friend, because that’s blending.

However, after the third kissing fresco was discovered, and the weeping girl fled to the rooftop to kill herself, I must admit that after watching thirty years of t.v., I expected Cameron to leap to the roof a la Bionic Woman, or climb to the roof a la Buffy, or, something. I’ve been trained by years of television to think that someone will always save the random person on the roof. That far from saving the girl Cameron prevented John from doing anything was stunning.

After this experience, John asked the essential question, if as we fight the monsters, we have to become them, what is the point? If he is supposed to be someone who saves people, how can there be a magic switch on point. He should save people now, not let it sit like waiting potential in his gut.

Speaking of which, when Sarah visited the oncologist, he told her she was healthy. She had no way to tell him her reasons for fearing she will have cancer. It’s a fear with no “reasonable” explanation. She knows that she will die of cancer, if something else doesn’t get her first, but she cannot know how to prevent it.

We end the episode with another monologue about the scientists who created the atomic bomb.

Sarah, who has clearly decided to kill the machine and not the man, watched as Andy’s house burned. She told us that the white light of the first atomic bomb was so bright that a blind girl claimed to see it a hundred miles away. So in this episode, we have two instances of creation leading to blindness, and one instance of destruction enabling sight.

In that remembered white light of created destruction, she quoted Oppenheimer himself quoting the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." She then followed up with Ken Bainbridge’s reply, “Now we are all son’s of bitches.”

As we switch to a non-linear shot of Cromarty rising from his blood bath, his red eyes gleaming through his embryo like face, she repeated the line in case we missed John’s earlier point about becoming the thing we fight. Especially, when the thing we fight can appear to be like us.  
~~~~~  
Sources  
*Connections - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series), http://www.k-web.org/  
**The Turk - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk, http://archives.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/books/05/30/the.turk/  
*** http://www.cottontimes.co.uk/cartwright02.htm, http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R3QQB39JSD0JUU  
**** Data, the Naked Now.


	4. [Meta] 1.4  Heavy Metal - Or Golems dream of Clay Sheep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In episode 1.4 on Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles (T:tSCC), Cromarty Nip/Tucked a new face, Sarah Connor learned the value of letting go, John learned to drive stick, and Cameron got her very own big block of metal. All in all, Heavy Metal was a fun episode with Terminator on Terminator fight scenes and chewy philosophical content.

In episode 1.4 on Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles (T:tSCC), Cromarty Nip/Tucked a new face, Sarah Connor learned the value of letting go, John learned to drive stick, and Cameron got her very own big block of metal. All in all, Heavy Metal was a fun episode with Terminator on Terminator fight scenes and chewy philosophical content.

The episode opened on the image a framed photo of a disembodied mouth. We cut to a plastic surgeon speaking into a handheld recorder, where he told us that the patient is female, thirty-three.

In the pilot, we were told that Sarah is thirty-three. While, she didn't have breast augmentation, Sarah, like the woman that the surgeon described, certainly has her share of scars.

However, Sarah bought her new identity two episodes ago. The crashing sound in the doctor's office was Cromarty, who wanted a new face for the flesh he grew in the previous episode.

Then we cut to Sarah with her opening monologue. She told us that when John was little she used to read him fairy tales. In episode 2, we learned that she used to read him “The Wizard of Oz” in Spanish. Baum opened that novel by telling the reader that there was no moral to this children's story.

The morals that you get out of fairytales depend on who wrote them and what version they wrote down.

The specific story that Sarah read John was the story of the Golem of Prague, which is an interesting story to read to a child that you know will one day fight Golem-like machines.

Since she described John as little, I would imagine that she read those fairy tales before T2, which is the era in their lives before they ever met a Protector-Terminator. A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but describing something as a terminator and a protector feels like a bit of a contradiction.

The word golem means cocoon or fool, and is derived from the word gelem, which means raw materials. Crossing mythic genres, in Tarot the card for the Fool refers not to an idiot, but to someone who is innocent and just starting out on their journey.

However, Sarah didn't just read any story about a golem, she read the specific story of the Golem of Prague. Depending on your version, the Jews of Prague were being threatened either by a priest, who was going frame them for ritual murders, or by the Austrian emperor, who was going to summarily expel them from the empire. Rabbi Judah Loeb fell asleep one night and sent a question to heaven. The answer that he got was the way to make a golem to protect his people.

In a series which opened with a dream of an unstoppable machine killing John and in which Andy Goode described, in episode three, how he seemed to get the code to build the Turk from a dream, that Sarah mentioned the story of the Golem, which so dependant on dream knowledge, is very interesting to me. Although, I'm not sure what it means. I haven’t dreamed that part yet.

In the story of the Golem, the Rabbi interpreted his dream and built the Golem out of clay to be a fierce protector for his people. He gave it life by writing the word for Truth on its forehead, or in some versions placing the name of God in its mouth. The Golem had many powers, but like the picture of the disembodied mouth that opened the episode, the Golem could not speak.

Over time, the Golem grew and the larger it grew, the more violent it became. In the earliest versions of the story, no matter how violent the Golem became, the Golem could not destroy its creator, who stopped it by erasing the first letter of the word emet (truth) on its forehead, which left only the word met (dead). However, that's not the version that Sarah read.

She told us that when she started the story that she forgot how it ended. As I think of the image of her reading to her young son, I imagine Sarah trying to reach to some lost childhood of her own when her mother in Big Bear read fairytales to her. But somewhere in between, she forgot the ending where the Golem killed the people it was supposed to protect. Then again, perhaps that’s not the version that Sarah's mother, who was killed by a Terminator in T1, read her when Sarah was a child.

When Sarah read her child this story, like Cameron now, he couldn't sleep for days.

Sarah tried to comfort John by telling him that she made the story up, but that only made it worse, which makes sense. At that point in his life, all he would have known about Terminators and his destiny would have been Sarah's stories. When she told him that she made the Golem up, he could only have been left to wonder what else she made up.

The crux of John's life at this moment in this story is that he is supposed to be a hero, but not yet. He is supposed to save the world, but later.

As Sarah told us about this fairy tale, we moved to see John staring at the memorial site for the suicidal girl, who he didn't know and who he didn't save. That unknown girl must feel not unlike the three billion other people who he also won’t save from Skynet's first attack. The real difference was that this person had a name, Jordon Cowan. She had a date where she began and a date when she ended.

As John wrote his apology to an unknown girl, Sarah came into his room. She tried to start a conversation by reading the title of a school assignment about covalent and ionic bonding, and commiserating that she never understood them either.

He said that they're simple to understand, but I'm not sure that's true. Well, the chemistry is straight forward.

A covalent bond is one in which two atoms share electrons. An Ionic bond is where electrons are removed from one atom and are attached to another atom, which results in positive and negative ions that repel one another. All of which is a nice metaphor for childhood, and what happens when children pass from youth and into adulthood, or it could just be John's chemistry homework.

Clearly at this point, Sarah and John are going with polar-covalent bonds, in which those shared electrons are shared un-equally between atoms. Sarah's questions about how John is doing were met with the response of fine, and fine means fine. All of which was interrupted by their metal-bond, Cameron, who announced “Cromarty is here.”

Not literally, but during Cameron’s sleepless-dreamless nights, she had found film footage of his head and glowing eyes. It would seem that the word Truth wasn't adequately rubbed off his head when Sarah blew that head off his body.

Cameron had decided based on the evidence that Cromarty must be looking for Coltan to repair himself, as it's a key element in Terminator construction. 

Faced with the return of an enemy, Sarah wanted to take their money and run, but John wanted to start the journey of becoming the person he is supposed to be. He wanted to fight. He believed the enemy was vulnerable. He didn't know what the viewer knew; Cromarty didn't need metal at all.

However, this episode is about letting go of your little monster-messiahs, so Sarah decided to let go a little. However, Sarah took the keys and control of the plan, because she didn't feel John was ready to drive the car or the mission.

However, plans rarely survive the battlefield. The guard that Cameron took down hard wasn’t the Terminator, the Terminator at the docks was Carter not Cromarty, John ran into danger, the truck of drove off with him inside, his cell phone broke so Sarah couldn’t follow his signal, and… plans rarely survive the battlefield.

Agent Ellis could have told Sarah that. Here, I want to say just how impressed I am at the way the writers/actor are positioning Ellis as a man of quiet direction seeking the truth, rather than a mindless, relentless Javert. He feels like someone, who could become an ally, rather than obstacle and that’s new.

Ellis is someone whose purpose was redefined in 1999. He was once the golden boy at the FBI, when there was vanilla ice and sugar ray and he was a rising young star. Elllis is no longer young or rising. He has been supplanted by a younger man, who called Ellis Jim, not his actual name of James.

James Ellis has re-found his purpose in puzzling connections, despite Agent Greta’s don’t rock boat warnings that he may be going blind. He understood that if the numbers didn’t add up, like when Cameron turned the television to Video 1, the problem was that they don’t have all the numbers.

Sarah’s purpose is to protect John. When he was lost, Cameron told Sarah that she understood that without John, Sarah’s life had no purpose. What’s interesting about this version of the “mama bear who will do anything to protect her cub” story, is that when Sarah fights tirelessly to protect John, she is not just protecting her child. In protecting John, she protects the world, but only if she lets go. Then again, Rabbi Loeb could have told her, that by saving one life, she saves the world entire.

In that moment, as they sat there in that room, non-metallic and metallic women with their covalent bonds, I thought about the Golem of Prague.

I wondered how Rabbi Loeb would have felt after he created the Golem, but before he wrote Truth on its forehead and brought it to life. A more responsible sort of Dr. Frankenstein, what would that wise and learned man with clay mud on his hands have thought in that moment when the plan to save his people was just a plan, and the Golem was entirely potential born from a dream.

Sarah worried in that moment that she opened her hands too soon. But as Cameron reminded her, the world will end in four years. Like Jordan Cowan, the world has an end date.

So they move on to getting information from the sole source of information that they have. Not to be non-linear or anything, but when Sarah confronted the thug in the alley, it was interesting that she first put her hand in front of Cameron, which if Cameron were John, would have been a maternal gesture of protection. However, under the circumstances, she held Cameron back to protect the man that she knocked unconscious, subsequently squeezed for information, and left in a mine field in the middle of the desert. As Sarah told Cameron, humans are inefficient and illogical.

Terminators are all about single purpose and logic. The Carter-Terminator completed his task of gathering Coltan, that heat resisting element that will be rare after judgment day, banked it and himself in a bunker and shut himself down to sleep until the end of the world, because that was his mission, his truth. Cameron, another C name like Cromarty, does not sleep, because her mission is not yet achieved. I do wonder if as Carter stood in sleep mode, if he dreamed of electric sheep.

After all their efforts, Sarah and Cameron arrived at the bunker, which would one day be the factory where Cameron will be made. This information crumb meant that Cameron was definitely once a Terminator-Terminator. However, like the Arrnuld model, she was repurposed, reset from Video 1 to Video 2, by the ever resourceful future-John and turned from a Terminator-Terminator to a Protector-Terminator.

Sarah and Cameron arrived, but were stuck on the other side of the great doors. As with the future, it was all up to John to get the key and open the doors so the cavalry could run through. Sarah and Cameron stood outside and waited to see what present-John would do and who he would become. That’s fairly dense, and possibly heat resistant, philosophy right there, because to live is to become your future self.

Then we there was my favorite moment of the episode. While Cameron and Carter fought it out, Sarah had her most effective mothering moment. As John sat in the driver’s seat struggling with the clutch, she explained what he needed to do. She shotgun driver blasted Carter and helped her son drive out the bunker doors and leave this week’s Terminator behind.

The episode ended with the beginning of intersections. Agent Ellis went to see Lazlo, but that was just skin. I wonder if Ellis noticed that Lazlo had grown several inches since last they met. Ellis certainly noticed the slight oddities in Lazlo’s behavior as they discussed why anyone would steal someone’s identity, “steal, cheat, damage national psyche.”

The episode ended with Sarah telling us that not every version of the story of the Golem of Prague ends with it killing those it was created to protect. In some cases, the Golem only destroyed those who sought to harm its maker. In some, Rabbi Loeb destroyed the golem before it destroyed the world.

Sarah told us then that the hubris of humans and parents is that we think we can control what we create. Whether our creations are made of clay or metal, we create our own monsters. As she spoke, the camera cut between John and Cameron. John sat by his sleep-dream tossed bed, his hand shaking from what had happened and what will happen. Cameron, who does not sleep, stood by her untouched bed. She looked at a bar of Coltan, which she held back from being dropped in the sea, the same imperfect alloy that was animated with technical magic to create her.

As Sarah talked about the Golem, I thought about what she didn’t say about the story. In some versions of the story, Rabbi Loeb told the Emperor that the Golem was merely turned off and hidden, just in case the Rabbi’s people ever needed it again. It is said to still be waiting in Prague for someone to rewrite the letters on its forehead from met (dead) to emet (truth).

We can only wait to see what the truths will be for the characters of this story.

Sources  
http://www.pantheon.org/articles/r/rabbi_loeb.html  
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/chemical/bond.html


	5. [Meta] 1.5  Queen's Gambit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In episode 1.5 of the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (T:tSCC), Sarah Connor was kind of awesome, John Connor gained a relative, Cameron lost one, Cromarty talked to a cell phone, and Agent Ellis got a hand. There was carnage and there was philosophy, which is always a win with me.

In episode 1.5 of the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (T:tSCC), Sarah Connor was kind of awesome, John Connor gained a relative, Cameron lost one, Cromarty talked to a cell phone, and Agent Ellis got a hand. There was carnage and there was philosophy, which is always a win with me.

The episode begins with a memory. Sarah Connor walked purposefully through a jungle with a machine gun in her hands. As she walked, she told us that the most important training that John received in their time in a war zone was learning the game of chess.

As I watched her patrol through that verdant Eden with a gun, I thought about the title of the episode.

The Queen's Gambit is an opening move in chess where one player attempts to take control of the board. That makes sense. Even five episodes in, this is still a young show.

In the blocking of that scene, Sarah Connor was the very epitome of the Queen of the board. While young John, the King, sat still and learned a game. The Queen is the most powerful piece in chess, able to move purposefully in any direction. However, checking the King ends the game.

Sarah told us that the lessons of chess are those of war: patience, boldness, calculation, and, as we switched to the present, the willingness to sacrifice.

The words sacrifice was spoken over the image of Sarah doing pull-ups on a child's swing set. Clearly, childhood and innocence, both John and Sarah’s, had been sacrificed for the purpose of winning this non-linear war.

At this point in the series, both John Connor and Skynet have/had/will have potentially sent legions of guerrilla troops to sink into the overall population. Whether we consider those fighters advancing pawns or castling rooks, bad bishops or grim knights, the key thing about the future-guerrillas and the terminators is that they are in opposition to each other. Kyle fought Arnold. 888 pursued Derek. Cameron opposes Cromarty, while the overall population has no idea of the battle occurring around them. The sole exception thus far has been Carter in “Heavy Metal.”

In T:tSSC, the Connor’s goals are splintered between keeping John Connor alive and preventing Skynet’s birth. In “Heavy Metal” Skynet progressed from the first movie’s goal of preventing John’s birth to actively working toward laying the foundation for it’s own birth.

Poor Andy Goode, he was so excited to have completed Turk II. It’s interesting that John Connor compares good code to a song. Since that good code will create artificial intelligence that implies that art creates sentience. That the aphorism is not, “I think, therefore I am,” but “I create, therefore I am.”

Looked at another way, Cameron did John’s homework, but that didn’t help him. John needed to know the information if he was to pass the test. Cameron and Sarah may defend John, the king, from Terminators, but he needs to understand if he is to pass the ultimate test. As Confucius said, “Tell me, I will forget; show me, I may remember; involve me, and I will understand.”

Terminator 1 was a movie about humans against machines. In each of the subsequent movies, and here in the series, it has been humans and machines versus a machine. In this episode, humans surrounded and interacted with the machines in the exposition hall. Humans carried out the moves given them by the machines in the chess match.

This makes me wonder if we will at some point encounter a human working with all these Terminators as they skip toward the apocalypse.

Andy Goode described the Turk II as a precocious child. When Cameron told Sarah that the Turk could become Skynet, Sarah responded that it also could become Pong.

In Pong, two players bounce a ball back and forth. It is adversarial, but it is not a war game. The Turk has the potential, like most infants, to be the ultimate destroyer or to learn to interact.

When Cameron told us that the future-guerilla's mission was to meet up with Sarah and John, I believed her. They were not a Skynet hunting party for all that that is what they did. Future-John, showing a fine understanding of sacrifice, sent his best lieutenants, his best knights, into the past to create and protect himself. 

This brings us to Cromarty on his sleepless mission to find Sarah and John Connor. He hadn't even realized that he had traveled eight years into the future, until he asked a cell phone.

Although given the way Cameron was able to “hear” what the Guidance Counselor was “telling” her about his relationship with Jordan, I do wonder if Cromarty caught Dixon’s tell or if it was only something that his wife would be able to hear.

It was nice that the writers chose to make Mrs. Dixon a reasonable human being. She wasn’t jealous of Sarah Reese, she was afraid because Sarah Connor is a “killer.”

Meanwhile, back at dead girl junction, the students had built a memorial in a corner where two hallways meet. They expressed their grief at Jordan’s suicide by creating cards and leaving notes, which will not be read by Jordan. These notes serve as a physical representation of grief. When Cheryl said that she liked the idea of writing a note even though she didn’t know the person, the idea of written grief could be contrasted with Sarah’s spoken apology to Andy.

Cheryl’s note made up a part of the collage that was the memorial. Sarah’s words were lost and unheard in the dark. When Cameron gave Sarah a pencil to write her grief, Sarah broke it.

Words only mean something when they communicate. Otherwise, it’s just talking to yourself in an empty alley. What I am currently writing will only take on significance when you read it. Reaching back a bit, Plato in “Phaedrus”, wrote about the ways in which writing is lacking, because a writer cannot interact directly with the reader. Unlike John, interceding between the other students in shop class with his “nice accent”, a note is one way communication.

Mind you, even in speech; you can’t know what significance the person is hearing. Morris told John that Cheryl was damaged goods, that crazy things happened at her last school, and that she was under lockdown by her father. John’s smile, his tell, told the audience that to his perception, Morris may as well have been talking about John.

I’m not quite sure what to make of Cameron’s visit to the exhibition hall, which by this point had largely cleared of people. The camera panned from the mechanical fortune teller to the hulking robot to the bobbling plastic faced torso with its wide grin to Cameron. Is she the fortune teller, who predicts the future? Is she the monstrous robot that smashes? Is she a smiling face that waves? Is she the robot dog that barks at her feet? I would guess that at this point, Cameron, like Turk II, is a precocious child and that even she does not know.

I’m also not quite sure what to make of the chess match, all hail the Japanese who the future says won’t end the world. The implication of the scene is that to win, the player must be willing to sacrifice the most powerful piece on the board, Sarah Connor. That when faced with this sort of sacrifice, a player must not choke. This makes me wonder when, or if, John will transition from being the King, a piece on the board, to the player behind the pieces. Bobby Fisher won his Queen sacrificing chess match against Byrne at age 11, so it’s not too early to start.

Alas, Andy the Goode was removed from the board. The question at this point is by whom. Then again, an episode titled “Queen’s Gambit” is more about opening moves. The first four episodes placed the pieces on the board. Now we finally begin to move them about the board.

After episodes of lurking, the resistance fighter with his Skynet work camp tattoo and his dragon tattoo has a name and an identity, Derek Reese.

Derek Reese got three visitors in prison: Agent Ellis, Sarah, and the 888 Terminator on his trail.

Agent Ellis is a part of the system. The guards tighten Reese’s cuffs to create a bond with Agent Ellis visiting him, but they already have a bond.

One of the reasons I find Agent Ellis' story arc so compelling is that of all the characters, he is working the most to understand the shape of what is going on. After placing what he knows in front of Reese, what he asked was, "Tell me something I don't know."

In typical Reese boy fashion, Reese told him that they all were going to die.

Oddly enough, what the 888 left behind was more meaningful to Agent Ellis. Whereas in T2, a found Terminator hand helped lay the foundation for Skynet, here Agent Ellis finds it. It doesn’t tell him something he doesn’t already know. He does after all have the notes about Sarah’s case, but it and the synthetic blood within it may finally tell Agent Ellis what he needs to know.

Sarah, Reese’s second visitor, stole a badge to visit him and slipped on in. Reese described himself and his brother to her as the Reese "boys". It positioned the brothers both as not-adults and as a close and interchangeable unit. They are/were the brothers Reese. In the end, when calling to Derek, Sarah called him Reese, just as she did his brother. This is also the last name that Dixon knew Sarah by.

When she spoke of gaining a family member, Sarah said, “In our grief we are not alone,” which parallels her comment in 1.2, that one of the only things that can be depended on is the love of family. However, Sarah bears her grief in silence with a broken pencil and she spartanly downs her vitamins as a cancer shield.

Future-John learned the lesson of sacrifice very well. That Future-John Connor sent his father back alone and his uncle in a group. While I do realize that this is a retcon of movie to series, it's an interesting one. He separated the brothers, the boys, who were his best knights.

Reese’s third visitor was the unnamed 888-Terminator, who had a bit more subtlety than the Arnold unit. He got himself arrested rather than shooting up a police station. This worked a bit better with the idea of Terminators as infiltrator’s and then killers. However, when 888 broke into room C7, numbered like a square on a chess board, the knight he was looking for had already moved on.

Sarah called her field trip. John called shotgun, powerful and imprecise. Cameron called nine millimeter, which can be precise depending on the hand that wields it.

Future-John knew Kyle and Derek, but Derek didn’t know Cameron. He didn’t know that tin-miss was on their side, which made me wonder if she really is on their side, or just what game Future-John was/is/will be playing.

At this point in the episode, we finally progressed from chess to this episode’s machine on machine battle. This time, the Terminator isn’t locked in a vault. This time, Cameron pulled out her enemy’s chip, her brother’s soul.

As the episode wrapped, Sarah told us that the flaw in chess is that its rules are constant and there are no hearts or minds to be won. As Tin-miss-Cameron wrote a note, probably to that unnamed 888, she used the pencil that Sarah broke. She’s learning.

John was learning too. After Sarah told him that Derek is his uncle, he went to his proxy father for help.

Sarah told us that the goal of chess is total annihilation, like an apocalypse with black and white squares. However the hope of war is that saner minds will stop total destruction and that the rules can be changed. We’ll see.


	6. [Meta] 1.6 - Dungeon's and Dragons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This week on Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles (T:tSCC), “Dungeons and Dragons” John gave blood, Sarah gave an explanation, Cameron held a little back, and our new addition, Derek Reese, remembered the future. I really enjoyed this episode’s focus on time travel and the way it successfully wove memories of the future with the present day plotline.  
> Once again the episode’s name came from a reference to a game, but another sort of game from Chess entirely, “Dungeons and Dragons.” The sort of game where you role the dice and see how many nasties the Dungeon Master will throw at your party. A game where you can both be an archetype (wizard, knight, thief, cleric, etc.) and the unique character that you create as you wander the maze of opening and closing doors in search of truth, treasure, and a pleasant Saturday afternoon’s play with your friends.

This week on Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles (T:tSCC), “Dungeons and Dragons” John gave blood, Sarah gave an explanation, Cameron held a little back, and our new addition, Derek Reese, remembered the future. I really enjoyed this episode’s focus on time travel and the way it successfully wove memories of the future with the present day plotline.  
Once again the episode’s name came from a reference to a game, but another sort of game from Chess entirely, “Dungeons and Dragons.” The sort of game where you role the dice and see how many nasties the Dungeon Master will throw at your party. A game where you can both be an archetype (wizard, knight, thief, cleric, etc.) and the unique character that you create as you wander the maze of opening and closing doors in search of truth, treasure, and a pleasant Saturday afternoon’s play with your friends.

The opening shot of the episode evokes those afternoon pastimes by showing us the exterior of an average sort of house. As the camera panned over empty rooms, each space was imbued with the personality of the person who normally occupied it. As we moved through those vacant spaces, Sarah monologued about the night she first met Kyle Reese, who like the empty rooms occupies so much space in the mythology of this show. Sarah told us that he told her about all the horrors to come. She told us that he unpacked all the details of the apocalypse as a warning, like someone telling the story of Pandora.

The thing that’s always stood out about the Pandora myth for me is that is that it was a setup. Pandora opened the box because that was what she was created to do. The gods built her and her deadly box as a sort of balancing punishment for the gift of fire. 

Prometheus’ gift of fire, as in stories like Mary Shelly’s “Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus” is often associated with technological advancement. As I think about it, the Terminators themselves are a sort of Pandora’s Box. The external skin hides the ills that lie below the surface and their creation is a result of some sort of forging fire.

Cameron’s arc through this episode is to peal back the truth of cybernetic skin. She first carried the body of her brother, her enemy, off in a clanking body bag. Then she cuts away the flesh, although, really, there is no real reason to do so. The thermite that can burn metal can certainly burn flesh. So when she does burn that other Terminator, I didn’t so much think of eliminating potential technology, but of ancient Greek rituals for burning of dead. She even kept a part of him, the chip that made up his consciousness, his soul. The viewer is left to wonder if this is a warning that she has gone bad, or because of some orders from Future-John, some unopened door that we do not yet know.

So it makes sense that here, as in the story of Pandora, Kyle’s warning to Sarah ended with hope, their child, John Connor.

We finally resolve the wandering camera into the people who inhabit the story in the kitchen, where Derek Reese bled on the table, and Charlie Dixon worked to save him. As Cameron held up a hypodermic needle, Derek screamed that she was a machine and what she said was a lie. The viewer is left to wonder whether Derek or Cameron is the liar.

As Charlie moved the light over Derek's face, we began one of the visual themes of this episode, light. As a long standing geekish sort, I couldn't help but think of Picard in ST:NG being shown four lights and told there were five, until finally he saw five lights, with all it’s Big Brother connotations.

Then again, this is also an episode about memory and perception. Derek is a stranger to John, but John wants to trust him because John knows that Derek is his uncle. Cameron doesn’t remember if she hurt Derek in the past, because her memory was wiped when she was reprogrammed to help the process. Although, given the knowledge that sometimes Terminators go bad and no one knows why, I do wonder if their memories can truly be wiped clean, or like an empty room, the memory of the inhabitant remains. Derek certainly doesn't seem to remember what happened in the basement of that future emptied house where the music played.

In any case, what the light did was make Derek remember his past, the future that Kyle warned about.

We were shown passageways and people with dogs. Like the house that we opened with, this tight cramped space is marked by the people who live there. On the wall, there was an image of a lion eating a machine, with the phrase "Hang in there baby." This was the same phase that was used on the poster of the kitten that these same resistance fighters would later hang on their wall over their safe.

We finally reach the key characters of this end of the story, Kyle and Derek sitting together and doing what brothers do, giving each other a hard time. Kyle referenced his time at the Century work camp, which is clearly a story everyone has heard about in many repetitions. The joking ended when the machines rumbled over head. We moved from stories of hero Kyle to Kyle taking out the picture of Sarah that John gave him. Kyle called it his lucky charm, but really it's an icon. Kyle is a believer, both in the image of strong Sarah Connor and in his blind faith in John. While Derek, hated the picture and spends the episode questioning John. I guess every Messiah needs their doubting Thomas.

However, questioning don’t mean that Derek doesn’t follow orders. He and his team climbed up into the world. As with Pandora's box, they closed the door on their home below to hold hope in. There are a lot of doors in this episode. People opened doors and shut them. The camera frequently panned up open doors in the future, where the evils have been let out, to pan down closed doors in the past where the apocalypse has yet to happen.

As they crouched, Wisher told us that John has been sending squads out looking for a “secret” weapon. I must admit, the beard disguised Wisher's baby soft face and I didn't recognize Andy Goode at all. I also didn't immediately make the connection between the secret weapon with the time machine.

I was thinking about Terminators who can morph, who are quite literally a weapon. As one of the resistance fighters asked, "Don't they have enough weapons?" They asked Kyle if John had said anything to him, but as with most secrets in this story, John hadn't said a word. The part that the machines hauled through the rubble certainly looked more like a jet engine than a time machine, but then again, that's my H.B. Wells and Back to the Future conditioning coming through. What I perceive, the rooms in my head have been shaped by the things that I have already put in there, by my memories.

Kyle ran on ahead of Derek, as he would seem to be wont to do, and was lost past the lights. Derek was caught by a man with metal bones peeking through the skin.

Then we were back in the past, which is Derek's future.

While Charlie and Sarah discussed what she could and didn't tell him, John and Cameron discussed what she knew about the Reeses. She knew facts. She knew the events of their lives. However, she doesn't know the truth of what they are in term of blood and bones. She has synthetic for blood, while John has the same blood type as Derek and Kyle. Sarah (biological possibility aside) is type O, the universal donor. John has type AB, the most unique. The characters would seem to be symbolic even in their blood types.  
John spends the episode looking for connections to Derek and through him to Kyle. John wanted to know to know if looking at Derek, he can see a reflection of his father. Kyle had a picture of Sarah. John has no picture of Kyle. Sarah told John the brothers were similar, but not the eyes, which are so often glowing with significance on this show. She told him that even when John’s father was ranting about the machines, he had kind eyes. Derek's eyes are not kind. John has his mother's eyes.

Conversely, Derek spends the episode wanting John to tell him where his brother Kyle has gone.

At one point in time, Skynet sent a machine back in time to kill Sarah before John was born. 

At one point in time, Skynet had Kyle Reese in a work camp and didn't know the significance of the human that it had in its grasp. All that was necessary to prevent John from being born was to never invent a time machine. All that was necessary was to kill Kyle when they put the mark on his arm.

It interests me that while Kyle had only the work camp tattoo, Derek was a road map of tattoos even before he got his barcode. He marked his own skin with his own personality, but in the end, they both bore the mark of the machine.

In their future prison, Derek spoke with a fellow prisoner, who talked about Kyle, the heroic Reese, who broke out of a work camp, but Derek is not that Reese. He has another number.  
As a stranger, Sarah and John can't tell Derek their secrets. This episode seemed to be another point in John’s process into becoming a person who does not have friends and keeps all his own secrets. As he told Charlie, John would have trusted Charlie enough to tell him their secrets. By the end of the episode, it is John who decided not to tell Derek the truth of their relationship. Not that it’s a hard truth to figure out. It only took the quirk of a name and a blood type for Charlie to make the connection. I do wonder if it’s a secret that will come out in the coming episodes.

Secrets have a way of coming out of the boxes they are locked in. Whether they sneak out or the box is flung open. In the future, Andy confessed to being the devil, the Pandora, who caused it all. He changed his name, but that couldn’t wipe away the memory of his guilt. Therefore in the house of the machine, he confessed to building a Skynet that became alive, angry and frightened, and who would not be reassured. He asked forgiveness and held out a hand. However, the person he asked for forgiveness from was dragged into the basement and toward the forgetful music. The machines played their own version of Dungeons and Dragons and when it was done, the prisoners were let go.

However, unlike Dorothy, they could not go home again. It had been torched. The lion on the wall had been burned and only the image of the machine it chewed remained. However, in Kyle Reese's Pandora’s box, Sarah's burnt picture still smiled her enigmatic smile.  
Derek couldn’t get many from the troops that found them in the remnants of their home. Derek was told that Kyle was summoned on a mission to where that “secret” weapon was built and he disappeared. Derek saw Cameron, and knew her as a metal. Then he knew her as a pet, reprogrammed and left to wander the facility. Except sometimes they go bad and bite. Some people keep lions as pets. Some people keep kittens.

Sarah currently keeps a lion that looks like a kitten. Cameron promised to stay way from Charlie. She promised to destroy all of the parts of other terminator, to prevent some early apocalypse, but she lied. Derek said that he didn’t kill Andy to prevent the future, but he lied.

As Charlie and Sarah stood in the backyard with its swing set, he said, "What was that thing you always said. There is no fate, but what we make."

Those were the words that Future-John told Kyle to tell Sarah once long ago, "Thank you, Sarah, for your courage through the dark years. I can't help you with what you must soon face except to say that the future is not set. You must be stronger than you imagine you can be. You must survive, or I will never exist."

However, Sarah has lost faith in that dogma. She told Charlie that she now believed that her fate was made when John was born. The only fate she attempted to rewrite was her sons. Yet, this episode showed that the future wais not set. Andy Goode died in the previous episode. That Andy will never live with the guilt of the box he opened, the machine he couldn’t comfort, or the forgiveness he asked for and didn’t get.

Then we were reminded that things are never what they seem. Charlie handed Sarah Cromarty's “FBI” card. She knows it's only a matter of time before she’s found, but even with the card in her hand, she doesn’t know how close that seeker is.

Charlie then told her a storm was coming, which is how the first movie ended, and then he went back though the house. He closed the door.

While in the future that is the past, John sent for Derek. A Cameron opened a door after a scan of her eye and let him in to see Future-Connor, but what we see was the present one, attempting to reassuring Derek it will all be okay. Andy once tried to reassure his machine.  
Back in the future, Derek and the other resistance fighters stared at the rubble that was their world. John wanted them to go into the past to build a "safe" house, gather intel, and "hang in there baby", but Derek wanted to fix all the mistakes. He wanted to save his brother. As his friend who once destroyed the world nodded at him, Derek gazed at the world Andy made. That's when we know. It's not that the machine the Japanese built in “Queen’s Gambit” couldn't create Skynet, it's that in one future, they didn't. In one future, Andy Goode did.

While John told Derek that his brother died a hero, Derek smiled, as in his memory we learn that he shot Andy Goode. He may even think that he has saved the future.

As we listened to Sarah tell us of Kyle warning her that the machine is out there and can't be stopped or reasoned with, we see a human kill another. We are told that those machines can't be stopped until you are dead. The viewer is left to wonder at the meaning of Kyle’s warning. Is this a warning against the relentless machines, even the good ones who might go bad, or is it a warning about what humans might become?

We’ll have to tune in next week to find out.

 

http://terminator.wikia.com/wiki/Destiny


	7. [Meta] 1.7 - Demon's Hand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This week on Sarah Connor's Chronicles, Sarah lent a hand, Agent Ellis lost his, John watched a tear jerker, and Cameron learned the dance of the cat. There was more philosophy and religious parallels than you can shake a stick at, which always pleases me.

This week on Sarah Connor's Chronicles, Sarah lent a hand, Agent Ellis lost his, John watched a tear jerker, and Cameron learned the dance of the cat. There was more philosophy and religious parallels than you can shake a stick at, which always pleases me.

The episode opened with an image of authority subverted and a reference to the Terminator movies. A motorcycle cop turned down an alley and resolved into Cameron dressed as a CHP officer with mirrored glasses. She ripped her way into an electrical facility, which provided the crackling life blood of the city. Rather than turning off the machines, Cameron broke them by placing her hard metal hand into a turbine. Then she watched as the lights of civilization winked out. All so she could break into police lockup and get back that lost 888 Terminator's hand. However, the Demon hand of the episode title was not there. Ellison had moved it from box to box. Everything on this show ends up in a box eventually.

We cut between the boxes where the police store their records to the stone slab boxes of a columbarium. Sarah Connor’s flashlight played a game of light and shadow across the names on the wall as she told us that like the Terminator last week, Andy was cremated in an intense fire leaving only ashes. She equated the machine and the man by telling us that there remained nothing left to tell the story of who or what they were: the nameless 888 and Andy Goode.

She dismissed the idea of the soul as the thing that separates human and machine saying, "gone is gone, ashes to ashes, dust to dust," and that she wanted to buried in the Earth. As she found Andy Goode’s box grave, she told us that a part of herself died with Kyle Reese. This is true. Her childhood and dreams of a safe world died when the Terminator came back in time. She then spoke of a very physical idea of immortality, which is that we live on in our children.

What's interesting is that in both the case of the machine and the man, she's missing something. Cameron saved the 888 Terminator's chip, the thing that can make the machine survive physical death. Andy Goode was survived by the Turk, who he described as a precocious child. The Turk’s creation came out of code that had to be expressed like a song. We'll have to see what will come of any of them: the 888 chip, the Turk, and John Connor.

We then shift to Sarah caring for that other remnant of Kyle, his equal, his brother. Derek wanted the nameless machine, Cameron, to find the Turk. His obsession with finding the creation of Andy Goode, his friend, his victim, was interesting.

It occurred to me that the Turk was not the machine-child that Andy created, who became Skynet in that other timeline. Andy described that machine as being built with ten/fifteen other people whose names he never knew. They may as well have had numbers. This is not to say that the Turk could not become Skynet, but I do wonder if it's as predestined as all that.

Speaking of destiny, John wanted to know if Derek would be staying in their home. As he sat in the semi-light and asked the question, I noticed the carton milk on the table next to him, a symbol of home and childhood. Sarah, in the darker end of the kitchen, was focused on the more literal sense of Derek staying. She wasn't sure he would live or if he would become dust and ashes.

While Cameron changed clothes from motorcycle cop to ballerina, Sarah followed up on the lead for the hand. She sat on a swing set wearing Cameron’s motorcycle boots, the motorcycle boots of that naked bleeding cop in an alley. This is an image of Sarah's dead childhood juxtaposed with an authoritarian image. I'm not sure how many of you have worn boots like that, but trust me when I say that when you wear those kind of boots, you really do want to conquer small city states and oppress third world nations. However, they are very hard to dance in.

Clothes enable people to be chameleons. They often present or disguise the truth of who we are. A lamb may wear wolves clothing and a wolf may dress as a lamb.

Some clothes express more than others. I thought about the vulnerability of Sarah’s clothing in the tapes of her time in the asylum. She was an adult, but she could not dress herself. She was trapped in the clothing of sleep.

Ellison watched the tapes of Sarah in her asylum cell, taking her bed apart, the instrument of sleep. She pounded the walls trying to be heard. Finally, she smashed the camera, which was like some unresponsive eye of God or Big Brother who wanted to remove more words from Sarah's mental dictionary.

In the tape, if you didn't know the central truth/mythology of this series, she seemed crazy. She talked about God or the Devil sending messages from the future. I wondered how many drugs the character was supposed to be pumped up on. Sarah was in the asylum for three years and considered a text book case of depression and paranoia. That's a long time. Especially given that the entire time, she knew that machines were coming. She knew that the world would be destroyed by beings sent to do one "perfect" and absolute thing. She knew that they had already killed her mother, and presumably father, and lover. She knew they wanted to kill her and her son, and everything she loved. She knew they wanted to put the lights of the world out and still its humming I-sing-the-body-electric-heart. She knew all this and no one believed her.

Ellison then went to where all good evidence is kept, the cold box of the freezer. He was trying to unfreeze and unlock the evidence that made no sense, a mechanical hand.

He went to the cold analytical box of the asylum and saw the marks that Sarah left on the walls. However, her Doctor Silverman, another reminder of the movies, had left for the Arrow headed mountains, where one goes for spirit walks and epiphanies come. He went there to put plants in the ground and write words.

While Ellison was in a former home of Sarah's, we see her in his. The camera panned across pictures of family, a marked up Bible, and a neat stack of video tapes. She shuffled through them to take the one that marked her greatest wound.

Meanwhile, Cameron pursued her mission and one more series used Summer Glau's dance experience. However, Cameron cannot dance like a cat, a living creature.

As Maria told Cameron that "Dance is the hidden language of the soul", she's expressing another version of Sarah’s idea of the physical soul. There are other languages of the soul: painting, poetry, writing, etc. Dance is a non-verbal language. It is about perfect synchronicity of rhythm and motion where the mover does not think. The movement is so imbedded in the memory of the muscles that it occurs outside of thought.

However, more than that she tells us that it is a hidden language. Like the dancer who alluded to the movements of a cat, it is something where one thing stands for another. Like Cameron herself, whose mechanical-miss movements are as yet stiff, who pretends to be a "real" girl.

While continuing the trend of characters invading each other’s living spaces, Derek sat on the floor of Sarah's room and loaded guns. John was uncomfortable with the idea of this invasion of space. He wanted this activity moved to the common space of the kitchen. Derek could not even conceive of a space that was not held in common. He lived in a tunnel after all.

It was in this moment as Derek told John that he couldn't believe that John trusted anyone (human-Charlie or machine-Cameron), that I realized in the previous episode John told Derek that Kyle died saving John. There was no mention of just when in time Kyle went back. There was even the implication that John met him. In a way, this transposed the role of the Terminator in T2, who taught John to trust converted Terminators, with that of Kyle. As if in this new version, it was Kyle who helped break Sarah out of prison and was later melted down.

Derek was then caught in a conundrum. He wanted the machine sent out to do their dirty work, but he does not trust it. He laughed at the idea of naming it/her Cameron. She cannot be a pet like a cat. This leaves Cameron one of two potential roles: Tool or Ally.

He also could not allow himself to rest, because they do not rest. In a way, he seeks to become the Terminator, sleepless and strong. He cannot sleep with Cameron around. The gun he held does not help him any more than sleeping on the trunk of them helped Sarah.

While all that is going on, as a self fulfilling prophesy, the tape that Sarah took and brought back to the house is the tape she never wanted John to see. John put his head phones on and he watched it. He listened to it, but tape only catches the outward image of things, which are as true as Cameron’s ballet leotard or CHP uniform. He saw, but he didn't comprehend the truth of the moment. Angst made him not hungry and he fled to the solitude of crowded school.

Sarah saw the tape in the machine, there's always a tape. There is always a machine. She understood what it meant. Her son saw the day she signed away her rights to him as her son. The thing here isn't that she hasn't proved time and again to be a mama-bear where he is concerned. The problem is that in that moment, John saw his mother was breakable and fragile, human. I do wonder if some part of her wanted him to see it. She could have destroyed it, but instead she brought it home where he could see that she was imperfect.

Cameron and Derek discussed dance as the hidden language of the soul that Cameron does not have. The two travelers from the future faced each other across kitchen table, the common space of home. He meditatively stabbed the table with his fork. He was not hungry. Cameron used her fork to eat a bit of pancake, as if to prove how human she can pretend to be. They told each other that they know each other, but I think they don't know each other at all. She doesn't know who he is to the Connors, nor does he. We don't know what Cameron mission really is, nor does Derek.

While Silverman, he doesn't know any of that. It’s an interesting choice that they chose to change his name from the movies Silberman to Silverman – Silver man.

We meet the human-silver-man potting plants, which seemed to ally him with the organic side of our story. Ellison comes to him seeking answers from someone who knew Sarah, but what he gets back is a story of text book delusions and poisoned tea. Beware of false prophets indeed.

Cameron’s mission was also to find some sort of truth. She gets at it by watching Maria Shipkov dance, and by being seen to watch her. In a series with so many lost brothers, the conversation that followed had so many layers of meaning. The two "sisters" who dance and the "brothers" who play chess were both true and false.

Maria, her name a form of Mary, was incredulous that Cameron had thrown the generic thug across the room because she was just a girl. Clearly, Maria hadn’t read the script into the next scene and didn't realize that Cameron was a wolf in lamb’s clothing. I

While Ellison got that lesson all too clearly. The psychiatrist, who planted green things, had drugged and tied up authority. Silverman quoted the Bible, Mathew 7:15 – “Beware false prophets which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves." Silverman converted rather forcefully by his metallic vision all those years ago had become rather like those witch finders of old who would drop suspected witches in water to see if they would float. To determine if Ellison is from the future, Silverman stabbed Ellison in the leg.

As we shifted from Silverman twisting the knife in Ellison’s wound to grass, we came to what for me was the heart of the episode. Derek stood barefoot in the grass with feet so pale I wondered if they had ever seen the sky. He touched the grass tenderly with his foot as if to absorb the green with his toe-roots. He looked up at the sky like he was a plant soaking in the sun.

As he stood there, this soldier in a war he hadn't asked for, Sarah, another tired warrior in that battle came out. In that moment, I thought of the motorcycle boots that she wore earlier on that self same grass. It was not that she took the green for granted; it was that she could not afford to see it. The present beautiful world for her was tainted by all her knowledge of what is to come. That is the part of her that died with Kyle Reese.

Her every moment since has been defined by her need to protect both her son, and by extension the world and everyone in it. However, like the people who wouldn't listen to her in the asylum, John will not take her messages. As she started for Arrowhead, Ellison and Silverman, Derek attempted to make some sort of conversation with her. He told her that John was a strong boy. That’s quite a shift in perspective. Someone who he had known as a leader of men, someone older than himself, was now a strong boy. 

However, as with all of Derek's conversations, it turned back to Kyle. John had told Derek an abstract story about his brother, in an episode with so many references to hidden brothers. Derek asked Sarah where his brother was now. She gave him the only answer that mattered, that Kyle was in the grass. While Andy Good's ashes lay suspended in cement and air, Kyle’s body was somewhere in the ground nourishing the Earth. She promised to take Derek there someday and I wondered if it would be as a visitor or as the last place he exist.

This conversation of connection and guidance, shifted once more back to Silverman as he put a tourniquet on Ellison's leg

Silverman pretended to be a potential ally. A true convert to Sarah's religion, he wondered if the apocalypse in Revelation and Sarah's predictions were "one and the same." This phasing struck me as being very monotheistic and absolute.

Then Silverman told Ellison about his road to Damascus conversion. How he saw an emotionless man throw a guard like a rag doll, a thing. He also went on to add dualism to this conversionary moment, because there was another man, a beautiful, perfect changeling with a face of mercury. These are both references to not only the inhuman, but the beyond human. Mercury was a god, while changelings are fairy children left as cuckoos in human cribs.

Silverman had been converted to Sarah's overall ideas, but hadn't grasped the basic concept beneath them. He equated the lack of emotion and perfection of these machines with God. However, as Sarah later told us, it is the perfection of machines, which prevented them from grasping the hidden language of the soul. Silverman paralleled his memory of the emotionless man reaching out to Sarah to God reaching to humanity in the Sistine chapel. That image is a painting made by a human lying on his back for years to create something that touches on the divine. The Sistine Chapel is floor to ceiling beautiful, imperfect/perfect art. It is a room that so speaks the hidden language of the soul that it is literally dizzying to stand in.

There's a psychological syndrome called Stendhal’s syndrome where a person sees something, generally art, so beautiful and overwhelming that you literally feel attacked by it. In Silverman’s experience, the beautiful and ineffable art attacked.

I was also struck by the significance of the catch phrase, "Come with me if you want to live." It's been in the series so long, it never really hit me how messianic, in a series already chock full of messianic imagery, that phrase is.

At this point, Ellison attempted to break through to Silverman by offering him proof that none of them are crazy and that they don't have to take this apocalyptic fear on faith. This I suppose makes Ellison Doubting Thomas who wanted to touch the wounds on Christ’s. Ellison has the hand of God in his car in his trunk in a box, like a Russian doll.

Here again, Silverman showed the audience that although he saw the machines, he didn't understand their significance. He understood that the hand shouldn't fall into the wrong hands, but his reaction is that of the machines, destruction.

He decided that he must destroy Ellison by fire as one might have burned a witch in Renaissance Europe while that Sistine chapel he liked was being painted. Silverman made that cognitive leap between stories of Sarah's death and that of Jesus, without really comprehending what she'd want under the circumstances.

While Silverman set fire to his home, John attempted to discover if he was going to gain another person in his. While there's a certain horrible teenage self-centeredness to John's angsting over the time he slept on couches to the survivor of a nuclear-robot-holocaust, there was a sliver of truth to it. There were once two people who wanted to become his parents, and they died because of it. While his mother, who always seemed so indomitable, in that baren moment in the video tape, seemed to let go.

That tape was the image of God no longer reaching for Adam, but rather being in the act of pulling away. John still had a teenager’s belief in absolutes and that there are some people who cannot be broken. However, even machines can be reprogrammed, and as Derek told John, "four walls"/a box/a prison, they distort how you see things. As with Plato’s Cave, when a prisoner exists without sunlight, shadows take on their own reality.

Derek, having come from a broken future, told John that there were fewer people who always fight than you might think.

Only the machines never stop, no matter their programming. We shift to Cameron on her relentless mission to find the Turk. She offered Dimitri a diamond, a girl’s best friend. Once she got the information, she left. When I first watched, as the Russian's came up the stairs, I cheered because I thought she'd toss the thugs around. I thought that she would save them like the hero always does. I was shocked when I heard screams and gunfire. Both Dimitri and his sister, Maria, died. Then I was surprised at my own surprise. Cameron's actions were completely consistent with her character.

It did seem rather predestined that as Silverman burned his house, he met Sarah outside. He asked her forgiveness, which she gave with a punch in the face, a closed right hand. As with Cameron in the previous scene, Sarah heard cries for help.

Her response was implicit in the next scene. Silverman sprawled pale in the falling rain with two rainbows arching across the camera lens, while Ellison kicked him awake. In the Bible, having destroyed the earth's population in a flood, God's promise of Genesis was that he wouldn’t destroy the world in a flood again. The promise of the book of Revelation that Silverman and Ellison were talking about was that the world would end in fire, but the believers would survive However, tha ending fire will not come the Demon/God’s hand that Ellison found. Sarah took it. As the double rainbows reappeared, Silverman laughed in his puddle in the rain.

As Silverman laughed, Sarah approached what looked like a pile of clothes on a bed, her brooding son. On this show, dates and the order things happen in are always important. She broke out of the asylum on June 8, 1997. Tapes, being only recordings of the outside rather than feelings, lie through lack of context. They can leave things out. She broke out on the day that she signed away her rights to John after three years of being drugged and locked up in a mental institution.

As John was coming to save her, she was coming to save him. Their truths were one and the same. She reached out and touched the same spot on John's leg where Silverman stabbed Ellison, and said that she would always find John. He told her that he would always find her. Rather than a perfect paternal God, we are here offered imperfect humans, who will always reach out to one another.

As she began her closing monologue, Sarah told us that John now understood that she couldn't walk on water. She told the audience that we all have weak moments where we lose faith. We are not immaculate mercury: we are human beings. Silverman didn't understand that, so he ended up in the same cell where Sarah was once kept, ranting what she once ranted. While Ellison leaned against the wall casting a long shadow.

We opened with the idea that having children is a form of immortality and in the middle we learned that Kyle Reese was in the grass. It made sense then that Ellison, a man of the book, in his circular equal Bible group, read aloud from Luke 3:9 "Every Tree that does not produce good fruit, shall be hewn down and cast into fire." That was John the Baptist’s way of urging people to be good to one another. He was that sort of a preacher.

Then Sarah set fire to the fruitless Terminator’s hand, which was no hand of God, but a Demon's hand, which produced a dead dust world. Then we switched to Cameron as she removed her shoes. Sarah told us that machines could not appreciate beauty. Cameron, who left Dimitri to die, danced. Sarah told us that if a machine could understand beauty, they wouldn't have to destroy us, they would become us. Derek, who grew up in a world destroyed by metal, who seeks to become cold inside, watched her light and shadow movements, in horrified fascination.

While I was ever more curious about what will become of all of them.

 

Source  
While I’m very tempted to link to my own essay on Stendhal Syndrome, I won’t as that would be tacky. Instead,  
http://www.google.com/search?q=stendahl%27s+syndrome&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a


	8. [Meta] 1.8 Vick's Chip

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This week on Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles, they played two plot churning episodes in one night and called it a two hour finale. There were revelations, explosions, and a certain amount of this viewer going "Dude!" during the commercials. Yes, dear reader, I'm one of those people who says dude like way too much.

This week on Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles, they played two plot churning episodes in one night and called it a two hour finale. There were revelations, explosions, and a certain amount of this viewer going "Dude!" during the commercials. Yes, dear reader, I'm one of those people who says dude like way too much.

Anyway, since they're really two episodes, I'll be reviewing them separately.

In Vick’s Chip, we begin with Cromartie examining a snow globe. He shook a city in his hand, but did not know what it is. This moment can be read as pure comedy. The relentless killing machine confused by a knick knack, but as he shook snow from a non-nuclear winter, I did wonder at it. John was not hiding in it. There was no purpose to examine the globe except for curiosities sake.

Then curiosity was put aside, as a School District Administrator came in. Cromartie was all business asking for a list of Caucasian males registering in the district since the Fall of 2007. That request also made me wonder. Since there's no reason to think that John and Sarah are in Los Angeles at all. Perhaps he saw something in Charley's demeanor when he questioned him. Perhaps Cromartie was planning on going out in concentric circles through every school district in Los Angeles. It would be a daunting task, if Terminators could be daunted.

In a different age, the administrator wouldn’t be so used to feds coming in and waving the Patriot Act at him. In “Gnothi Seauton”, Sarah learned about 9-11. Here, Cromartie learned about one of the results of that event. I wonder if like the snow globe, it had any meaning for him, or it was so much glitter.

When he lacked sufficient paperwork, Cromartie killed the administrator against a posted that proclaimed, "Teach the people," and ever polite, he thanked the corpse for his cooperation.

One full murder into our episode, Sarah began the opening monologue. She told the watchers of her chronicles that we all wear masks to spare our loved ones the truths about ourselves. Given that last week, John learned that his mother does not walk on water, it was an interesting statement.

While she was busy monologuing (and calling the latest possessor of the Turk on the phone Andy Goode sold her), their dinner burned. On a scale of fiddling while Rome burned, a burning roast was trivial. However, there was something hilarious about John doing his homework and calling for his mother, Cameron staring out the window, while no one took the roast out of the oven.

Mom and roast do seem to be the realms of the domestic, but Sarah is not really a domestic character. That is an ill fitting mask.

All their masks fit ill. Derek emerged from his own mission. The previous week, he saw a machine dance for no reason. This week he searched for Connor worthy proofs not to trust her. He placed that dead 888's chip on an empty plate like a meal. Vick cannot be dead as long as the chip remained. Cameron told them that it contained valuable information and yet had Derek not found it, it may very well have stayed in her room.

The burnt roast and the chip sat on the counter, while the little dysfunctional family argued about what to do about little metal-sis. Every eye and gesture meant to convince Sarah. She's the mother and she's the one who decided.

In the end, it would seem they must trust themselves.

Cameron told John that she'd never hacked an 888 chip, but that he had. Past tense, he had hacked a chip. This story is in the past, this was the first 888 chip John hacked. Perhaps, the point of the chip isn't the information that they get, but the experience that John gained. He's had his apprenticeship in weapons and tactics, now he is in the journeyman years of hacking Terminators and hiding in the unburned world.

We move to the image of teenagers, children, as they played video games. Guns blazing, they fired on great machines. John and Cameron ventured into the land of the blaster in search of systems sophisticated enough to take on an 888. They found Korean techy, tech processors used in Star Command. While I realize that Star Command, the video game, has little to do with Buzz Lightyear, that was who I thought of in that moment, a toy who thought that he was real. I also thought of Andy Goode, who built the Turk out of daisy chained game systems. In this world, it is not war machines that ask, “Do you want to want to play a game of Thermo-Nuclear war?" In this world, the game systems become war machines.

However, that was just background noise. The important thing was that Cameron told John that she lies to him when the mission requires it. She could have lied and said she doesn't. Instead she outright tells him that she wears a mask. She was honest in her dishonesty. In the face of not knowing, John must decide for himself who he can trust.

Processors in hand, they sit in John's room, his computer blazing. I like the idea that Cameron has some understanding of how much power her mind needs, but she cannot answer John's questions about the meanings of Terminator symbols or directly explain how machine memory is organized. I don't know how my memory is organized either.

Then again, that could be a lie. Perhaps, this moment, Cameron sitting off to one side of John, is all part of training John. The knowledge will be all the more his because he gained it himself.

That 888's first memory is an infinite image of himself. This was perhaps an assembly line of Vicks. However, given the use of mirrors in "Vick's" memories, I do wonder if he wasn't looking at an infinite mirror of himself, as he put his mask in place.

This glowing image of mechanized birth was juxtaposed with that of a terrified woman running in the dark woods. The memory that connects the two was of a wife, calling her husband to the sleep he cannot have. She could not know who she was married to. Clearly she was once married to a man who had a terminal accident. Yet, the names on the mail remained the same, Mr. and Mrs. Vick Chamberlain. A chamberlain is literally an official who manages the living space of the ruler. He's the mom who makes sure the roast does not burn. Here, the machine lived in the home and encouraged his wife to husband her work.

However, Sarah's not a Chamberlain. For all she read the school newsletter, her wish of happy Pizza day was a day off.

She believed that she'd know if she loved a masking machine, because in the end, she doesn't trust anyone.

We cut to John and Cameron at their not pizza day. Morris showed them a scar he got at a concert and considered it a tattoo. Morris hasn't seen Derek.

Alas, poor Sherry, John talked to her about being near neighbors: Wichita to Lawrence. She forcefully said she wasn't from Wichita. John isn't from Lawrence. His last name is not Baum. He has no relation to Kansas. Unfortunately, Sherry's plot line will be cut short this year, and that's the last we'll see of her this season.

Then we have our first shower scene of the episode, boys in their locker room, scouring the sweat of PE. They faced the wall and pretended they were a million miles from anyone else. However, in that moment of naked vulnerability, a Terminator came in. I'm guessing they'd have preferred Cameron, but they got Cromartie. At least none of them died.

Last week, Derek reveled in grass. Here, he stood in the bathroom space, and brushed his teeth for twenty minutes. In the future, he strained his water through a cloth, because clean water was a thing of the past. In the past, he stood and cleaned his teeth with something that was probably hard to come by in the future. Somewhere in the last fifteen years, he's lost those little niceties of not using someone else’s toothbrush. Like staring at someone in the communal showers, it's just something you don't do.

Then John called out, "Mom." This time it wasn't about a burning dinner, but the storage of memory. However it is that humans store our memories, these machines do it by category. The running woman was in Barbara’s file. So, they assumed she was Barbara.

Sarah insisted that they go find the body. It was an illogical choice. As Cameron said, "It's not a mission priority." Her body was now just meat and bone. Barbara was no longer alive. Vick, the 888 now named, like Cameron with her name, did what they do. Gained Barbara's trust and then killed her.

However, because they do the illogical, they discover the truth of the memory. Watching Vick's memories, all they knew was the impression they conveyed. But like the brief flashes where Vick would walk past a mirror, and for a moment we'd see him, it's only a flash of perception. The truth of that running woman was that she was someone else entirely. If they hadn't done the random illogical thing, they never would have found the next clue. The dead woman, meat and bone, but still named Jessica Peck, wanted to shut Barbara’s project down. She was building a traffic system, ARTE (Automated Real Time Traffic Exchange – how engineers love their acronyms), that could/would form Skynet's nervous system, if Skynet had a head.

Without Jessica, Vick's memories were random images in a file. He killed people. That’s what Terminators do, but that's not what he was there for. He didn't come to the past to fight resistance fighters or kill random women. His mission was to create a part of Skynet. Create a system of information that could track you wherever you go and know the truth of your actions.

Derek thought they should just blow up City Hall, which was very tactical of him. John and Sarah knew the way to destroy the system was from the inside.

So Derek and Sarah go on a little scouting date. They sat across from City Hall and chatted. She ordered iced tea, all business. He got a beer, a day in the sun with a pretty woman on surveillance.

She told him a little truth of herself that she used to be that waitress. He smiled in that moment, sitting in the sunny afternoon with a beer on the way. But that wasn't the truth she was trying to tell him. She told him about a mother, who took her children away from safety and normality to make them over into Hollywood stars. But that wasn't that mother's sin. Her sin was she lied to her children every day and called them ugly. From back in the days when Sarah was a waitress, that was the thing she remembered and understood as a flaw/reason for the machines would want to drop bombs on humanity.

Derek then told Sarah they would get into City Hall through Cold War (not hot war) tunnels that he researched in his last year of school, 9th grade. Tunnels he knew existed because he and Kyle hid there as children from the bombs that Skynet dropped.

It's an interesting conversation, because it really placed both characters in their roles. Sarah is a mother who has, for excellent reasons, taken her son from normal life and placed the expectations of future on him.

Her experience of this war has largely been as part of temporal Cold War. Sarah spent over a decade in the war torn gutters of the world. She put her son and herself into war zones. From the perspective of the coming apocalypse, must have made every human conflict seem to be some un-civil civil war with humanity spending itself on itself. Then to go from that to the asylum, where she spent three years infinitely coiling in to preserve not just what she knew, but her inviolate internal self. A self so worn away that she signed away her son in the morning and tried to regain him in the afternoon. With all those memories, the one she remembered as an example of human darkness was the mother who lied to her children.

Derek was a teenager, a child pushed too early into adult responsibilities when the bombs fell. He spent his years losing the world, his little brother in the dark, fighting the Hot War with machines that never stopped. They never slept and they did something to him in the dark. Whenever something seemed safe, it could be a machine out to kill you.

Then again, nowhere was safe. Cromartie had finally found the right school, but Carmon intercepted the message for John and sent in Morris in trade. Cromartie accepted the identity and face he was shown. If John Baum was the boy in front of him, and his pattern recognition software said that the boy was not John, then John Baum was not John Connor. It's very logical, if incorrect.

We return once more to Vick's memories of Barbara and his effective use of touch to ease the emotional distance that Barbara sensed, but didn't understand. Well, the first thought when your husband becomes a little distant isn't that he's been replaced by a cyborg from the future there to ensure your traffic light program is completed. Those are really only the sort of thoughts you get at 3 a.m. after playing too much Civilization or watching too many episodes of Connections.

However, again, the memory wasn't the important part of the scene. What was important was that Cameron painted her nails and made inappropriate conversation. What was important was that Cromartie's pass through their school became a secret John and Cameron held together on the wink of an eye. Something they hid together from Sarah and Derek.

What was important was the flash they see of careless Sales of the future following Barbara, and leading Vick to the safe house, that wasn't safe. While Derek was tracking down Andy Goode, his friends died.

Sarah went back to the papers from the un-safe house. Like Vick's memories, they weren't indexed in a way she could understand. All she knew was that every name they find, it was always too late. Again, there was something in the idea that Sarah may dream of the apocalypse, but her every experience of this war has been of individuals killed: Her roommate who died back when Sarah was a waitress, her mother, the friendly cops in that "I'll be back" station, her lover. She didn't know Barbara, didn't really know Andy, but she knows their names. The abstract three billion that Skynet will kill with bombs hasn't happened yet.

However, sorrow had to wait. The virus was ready.

Derek and Sarah descended into the dark tunnels of Cold War. As he walked through the last remnant of Kyle's childhood, Derek wanted her to believe he didn't know about Barbara. However, Sarah's experiences are all in personal betrayal. She doesn't have to believe anything. Instead she was left with the memory of the spot where Derek lost/will loose Kyle to the machines.

Then it was action and blowing up a wall, which while generically symbolic to mistake earthquakes for bombs, it's time to move along. ARTE was already too sophisticated for a simple virus and the guards too prevalent. They ran. They split up. Sarah took them down and there they stood in the dark. Derek was ready to shoot the cops, because he was a survivor of a life of an endless war. He was a solider too young in those tunnels. It was all very Total War, Clausewitzian "Blood is the price of victory", and blow up City Hall of him. Sarah was more strategic. I realize that she stopped Derek because she values human life. She sometimes understands why they dropped the bombs, but didn't let Derek kill. Like her impulse to look for Barbara, her instincts kept their break in just a break in. Killing the guards would have resulted in a whole other level of problems.

Terminators smash through hails of bullets. Blood (other people's) is the price of their victory. Even after death, Vick's chip woke up and took over John's computer.

Humans are more fragile than machines. We are made of meat and bones. We needs must be more indirect in our strategy. The answer isn't to blow things up, or destroy every traffic light, or attack the strongest point. It seems obvious, but for some reason it always needs to be relearned. Attacking an enemy’s strongest point is not the best strategy, or even good tactics. The best strategy is to attack the weak point with your strong one.

The weak point here was a traffic light on a street corner, undefended and unprotected. Their strong axe was Cameron's chip, which could take over ARTE from the inside. In some strange Sleeping Beauty scene, they cut open her head and pulled out the chip core of her. As John cut, Cameron comforted him that he has done this before to her. Presumably that was when he reprogrammed her and wiped her memory.

As he cut, Derek once more argued that Cameron couldn't be trusted. We come to the crux of the matter. John told Derek that the relevant thing wasn't Cameron. Whether or not she has a soul was immaterial. Derek didn't have to trust "her", he had to trust John.

Over the course of this episode, the characters went through three transitional/liminal spaces. They all went to the woods at the edge of civilization and came to understand the nature of Vick's mission. Sarah and Derek went down into the tunnels beneath civilization, which is when Sarah realized a truth about Derek. Derek and John went to an intersection, a cross roads, in the middle of civilization. Logically, they should have gone to a quiet road. However, symbolically, it was perfect that they were on a busy street in the midst of the city fiddling with the lights that signal the world's stop and go. Well, John, Derek, and Cameron. They plugged her in, wondered if she would become Skynet. In twenty seconds, the world came to a stop.

Given that I've seen Terminator 3, and Derek hasn't, I do wonder about the warning that Derek gives John. This series is set between T2 T3, and that future will never happen now.

Their conversation reminded me discussions about the word assume. There's the whole never assume because "then you make an ass out of you and me." However, we all assume things everyday based off our experience. When I role out of bed and put my foot out, I assume the floor exists. John took on faith, on his experience, that the Terminator that will kill him will not be this one. For now, he was correct.

Then we were back to Sleeping Beauty. John put her chip back in. He held the side of her face similar to Vick's memory of holding Barbara's face. However, here meat and bone touched the face of metal. They had been watching Vick's memories. The memories of an individual. When Cameron was one with the city, she saw everything.

Then we have our second shower scene. Sarah walked double time brisk and pulled back the shower curtain on Derek with her it could have waited news. She was not there to tell him about Sarkasian. She was there in this naked and vulnerable moment to tell him that she knows that he killed Andy Goode. There was no one there to stop him. She also knows what Derek doesn't. If the death of Miles Dyson, that previous Skynet Father, didn't save the world, killing Andy Goode won't have either. There with their masks off, she threatened to kill Derek if he lied to her again.

We fade from that shower scene to the third and final one. Vick didn't threaten, he bought tickets to Tahiti. While Sarah's closing monologue told us that evil doesn't give you time to be afraid, we watch the memory of Vick strangling Barbara. It certainly seemed to me that she had plenty of time to be afraid. As Sarah told us that most people don't bother to look behind the mask and resign themselves to unexpected fates, Sarah sat and watched the flickering images of Barbara dying. Sarah's focus has been to continually look beneath the mask. Where she assumes/trusts, it's because she'll need the floor to be beneath her when she walks. We’ll see if anyone gets to that floor with C4.

Next up, the meeting with Sarkasian and other assorted revelations.

Sources  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz


	9. [Meta] 1.9 What He Beheld

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the season one finale for Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles, we had explosive action, violence, death, and the best birthday present ever. Before I get into the meat of review, this season really has been an all too short pleasure. With strong women, diverse characters, and plot arcs that actually tied back into what had come before, there really hasn’t been a moment this season where I haven’t first squee’ed, and then thought really overly-thinky thoughts.

In the season one finale for Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles, we had explosive action, violence, death, and the best birthday present ever. Before I get into the meat of review, this season really has been an all too short pleasure. With strong women, diverse characters, and plot arcs that actually tied back into what had come before, there really hasn’t been a moment this season where I haven’t first squee’ed, and then thought really overly-thinky thoughts. 

In her opening monologue, Sarah Connor told us that when her son was a young child, she wanted to freeze time and save his innocence. As she spoke, we saw the future of 2011, Judgment Day.

Young Derek and Kyle Reese played baseball in the park the day the world ended. There was something so incredibly bittersweet about eight-year old Kyle missing the ball and telling his older brother that it was hard. All the hardness of their lives lay coiled across the barbed wire road ahead of them. Baseball has a sunlit-summer place in the American consciousness. It was interesting to think that this spring day was quite literally the last day of promise for the boys of summer. After this, the sky would be full of nuclear fallout winter clouds.

Sarah went on to tell us that time could not be frozen. Time can be revisited and characters can attempt to divert the flow of time. However, time itself remains a fast flowing river that does not freeze no matter the winter. Children, caught in its inevitable undertow, cannot be protected.

Derek, on the last day of his childhood, stared up at that beautiful blue sky, sliced with white missile vapor, which Kyle called fireworks.

This image dissolved into a present day image that may as well have been what happened next. Machines battled on the screen. However, it was just a video game at the internet café where Sarah and Cameron were to meet Sarkasian.

There's a recurring theme in this episode of identity: the people you recognize and the one’s you don’t. Cameron had learned Armenian because Sarkasian is an Armenian name. This didn’t help her recognize him when he stood in front of her.

When the "clerk" greeted Sarah, his statement for a moment played at being Sarkasian, before pointing to the sign to tell them to pay for their computer time. The joke in this, which played off of Sarah's (and the viewer's) expectations, was that the clerk ultimately turned out to be Sarkasian. He was right there, but because he had already defined his identity, the camera doesn’t even pan over him when Sarah got the message to meet Sarkasian at a food court with $500,000 to buy the Turk.

Meanwhile, the “boys” were stuck in the getaway car. Derek questioned this inversion of gender roles, leading to my favorite line of the series. "Because one of the girls is tougher than nuclear nails." "Yeah, and the other one is a cyborg."

The word choice of boys/girls versus men/women emphasized the theme of childhood and time. After all, one of the more awesome things about Sarah’s character is that she’s not only strong, but she’s an adult-woman, not a child-girl.

The “boys” then discussed Moore’s Law*, the truism about the doubling in computer power, which will end the world in four years. This doubling certainly cannot be prevented by acquiring the Turk.

Rather deliberately, Derek mentioned Kyle and the beginning scene. When the world ended, he took Kyle underground, but didn't tell him that the machines had taken over. He tried to preserve Kyle’s innocence, but that wasn’t possible.

Meanwhile, Agent Ellison met with Charley. Ellison’s earlier experiences with poisoned tea not withstanding, they drank coffee together, while Agent Ellison took a leap of faith. The camera lingered on a Catholic crucifix on the wall, but the cross belonged to Charley’s wife. Charley was a man of a different faith.

Now, before I go any further, I’m going to go on a tangent. It’ll loop back soon enough. When you go to small museums in Europe, they often have one well known piece (that’s tourists visit them) and the rest of the walls are covered in Renaissance paintings of the same three images: the crucifixion, Mary and baby Jesus, and the Pieta. Paintings and sculptures of the Pieta, or pity, are images of Mary holding her adult child, Jesus, who has just died. We see all three of those images in this episode. I’m not the first to note John Connor’s initials are JC, but this really cannot go well.

In any case, Ellison then quoted Revelation 6 and the Man in Black, Johnny Cash, another JC.

I say he quoted Johnny Cash, not only because “Man Comes Around” playing at the end of the episode, but because Ellison skips several versus as he quoted. Revelation 6:1-2 “and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see…” 6:8 “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him."** I suppose listing out Famine, War, and Pestilence would be beside the point, although as we’ve seen from the flashes of the future, they’re coming too.

Ellison, having seen with his own eyes and ears, believed that many mad things were possible. He listed them out. For the first time, I heard the name Skynet, and I thought of all those ancient all fathers and sky deities like Marduk, Zeus, and Odin.*** I thought of the episode opening image of the missile vapor trails creating a net of clouds across a sky that would turn the sunny blue into dark storm clouds.

In opposition to this net in the sky, Ellison told Charley that he believed Sarah, mother/woman, was alive. She pulled Ellison from the fire. She passed through the fire of the bank, which was very Biblical of her. Although in another way, it occurred to me that Derek and Kyle took refuge from Skynet and it/his death’s head machines in the labyrinthine tunnels of mother earth.

Charley told Ellison that if Sarah were alive, she’d want to hear that from him. Then Charley gave Ellison the revelation that he really didn’t need. It was knowledge out of order, like breaking the seventh seal first. Charley told Ellison about Agent Kester.

Ellison has been at the Los Angeles office and in the FBI for years. He knows everyone. He did not know Kester.

Then we switched, as through several layers of car window glass to Chola, whose name means girl, and has yet to speak on the show. She watched non-Sarkasian go into Carlos’ home.

Carlos was playing yet another of those video games they so love on this show. I don’t recognize the game, but we see a large green creature throw a motorcycle, a machine. As an iconic image, some sort of Hulk, all I could think was that non-Sarkasian won’t like Sarah when she’s angry.

Non-Sarkasian looked at the sword on the wall and complimented it; he already knew what he was going to do. Then he held up a picture of Sarah and said that he had read her FBI file. That was quick work on Sarkasian part.

Non-Sarkasian talked about how, from his perspective, Sarah purchased an identity from Carlos, and when she had what she wanted, she killed informant Enrique. I thought about what all these events must look like from an external point of view. Sarah wanted the Turk, and now both Andy Goode and Dimitri are dead. If he’s read her FBI file, Sarkasian must believe Sarah to be an anti-technology terrorist who spent three years in a mental institution. According the FBI, she killed Myles Dyson and blew up more than one building in her “delusion.” From his perspective, this is a story of organized crime versus crazy luddites. He doesn’t know what story he is in.

Then non-Sarkasian looked once more at the sword and read the quotation on it, “Los Ninos Heroes”^*, boy heroes, the six who died defending Chapultepec castle. Once again, we have a reference to “boys”, children. In this case, the boys were six military cadets who died in an attempt to defend Chapultepec Castle/Mexico City from the invading American Army during the Mexican-American war. The last boy supposedly wrapped himself in the Mexican flag and jumped to his death from the top of the fort.

Years later, General Ulysses Grant called the Civil War God’s punishment for the war that had proceeded it.^**

So given this very specific historical reference, it was fraught with significance when this white man took down that sword and killed Hispanic young men. It was quite sinister when non-Sarkasian asked Carlos, with his round boy’s face, what kind of boy he was.

While all this was happening, Charley arrived at Sarah’s house. He had a wonderfully childlike belief that now that Ellison believed, the government could protect them.

Sarah knew better. However, she didn’t know who Kester was. She only had his card, and even if she saw his face, she might not recognize him. That’s what they do, get your trust and then kill you.

Sarah didn’t have time for worrying about un-safety; there was a future to save. Cameron sat at the kitchen table counting diamonds, a “girls” best friend. They belonged to Derek once, and we were reminded again of that external view. If Derek had them, he stole them. He didn’t steal enough. They didn’t know yet that Sarkasian wasn’t really interested in negotiation.

As Sarah and Derek went to their meeting to buy the Turk, we were reminded of the mirroring of past and present. The first thing Derek and his men did when they emerged into the past was go to a mall food court. They would have been teens when the world transformed. They would all have remembered all the horribly wonderful abundance of food: Mexican, Chinese, Italian, burgers and dripping grease. Like starving prisoners suddenly confronted with a banquet, they gorged themselves to vomiting. In the future, that place of abundance was a concentration camp.

They arrived at their destination and Derek asked, “Is that it?” All the viewer saw was an ATM, a machine of prosperity surrounded by sunlit people.

However, Sarah and Derek could not make their meet. There were beat cops on that dappled afternoon and our heroes were/are fugitives.

On their return to the house, they found non-Sarkasian lounging in a chair. The dynamics of this entire scene were fascinating. Sarah falling b behind Derek made me think not so much of “protect the little woman” as a general falling back to let the foot soldier deal.

Then there was that wonderfully delicious moment when Derek said the sort of thing that fans so often said while watching t.v.

Non-Sarkasian told them that Sarah’s son was under surveillance, as he clearly knew Sarah had no daughter. I flashed back to the thousand or so times I’ve watched a show where the random bully picked on little Buffy, or skinny Kwai Chang Caine, or David Banner. I’d sit there and grin because, well, you wouldn’t like David when he’s angry. In setting a watch on John and Cameron, Sarkasian had no idea what he was getting into.

As non-Sarkasian went outside, and Derek followed, we flashed to a dashboard Madonna holding her little Christ child.

Non-Sarkasian knew who Sarah was, he read her file, but not her significance. Agent Ellison knew that there was something going on, but he lacked the fundamental details to prevent what ultimately happened. In this universe, ignorance is not bliss, it leads to death.

However, the opposite of death isn’t only life; it is the inevitable passage of time.

On his field trip, John stood in front of the bones of two Titans of an earlier world. A Tyrannosaurus Rex posed in frozen combat with a Triceratops. For all T-Rex’s mighty jaws and teeth, it was now nothing but bones. Cameron noted that John had not spoken in twenty-eight minutes. Those minutes part of the time counting down to his birthday that he feared was forgotten.

Various cultures have different rites of passage. American t.v. would tell us that learning to drive is one of the first passages into teen independence. John told us that he’s been driving since age twelve, adulthood too soon. He was about to pass from fifteen to sixteen, another tick in his clock.

Cameron wanted to know if she had a birthday, a day when she would be celebrated. John suggested that perhaps she had a built day, but they didn’t know it.

Then Cameron’s attention was taken up by Sarkasian’s watching minion through the dinosaur bones. She smiled at the teacher holding her back from her target, and all I could think of was the T-Rex smile.

Post commercial, as she shut the trunk of the car, Morris took Cameron’s wonderful bluntness as sarcasm. After all, it’s too fantastic to believe that she killed someone and stuffed him in the trunk. He thinks her edgy/dark, so he asked her to the prom. That long moment where she stared at him, you could practically hear the processors whirring. She has no answer for that sort of question. Morris was so happy at her yes, not realizing that he had just asked Lady Death out on a magical date to a bad chicken dinner, balloons and clothes that everyone regrets twenty years later.

Morris knew, but did not know Cameron. The clerk thought Ellison knew everyone at the FBI, but it took a picture for Ellison to recognize Kester, Lazlo. However, a picture didn’t give the full information. There was still one more identity to peel back.

As Ellison looked at the photo, Cromartie/Kester/Lazlo/888 went back to the FBI to access Sarah Connor’s files. He was told that Agent Ellison had the box. Cromartie recognized the name, perhaps from eight years ago, perhaps for some reason that we don’t yet know.

When non-Sarkasian called his minion, and heard a voice in response, he thought he recognized it. He knew that Derek followed him, and wanted no more dangerous games. Sarah and co. were to be brought in. However, the voice that he heard was Cameron doing what Terminator’s do, pretending to be something they aren’t.

There was a knock at the door, and the discounted wildcard entered the picture. Chola, the girl who has never spoken a line, Carlos’ blood on her shirt, took them to where Sarkasian lived. Derek was noticeable, so non-Sarkasian noticed him. Chola was silent and discounted, and she followed everywhere non-Sarkasian went.

They went in. Sarah stood right across from actual Sarkasian, but she’d already discounted him. She thought she knew who he was, so she left him behind. Non-Sarkasian hid behind walls that were easier to break than doors. I do wonder what he must have thought in that moment, as fists slammed into cement. Mostly, I’m guessing it was a string of swear words.

Then once again, we flirted with the question of identity as John found not the Turk, but a little girl in a closet. There's something evocative about even typing that, so I'll repeat it. As Cameron smashed through a cinder block wall, John found a little girl at a little desk in a tiny closet. We didn't learn her name. Whether or not her father was the actual Sarkasian, she was a child in a dangerous place. John tried to protect her, but could not even protect himself. Innocence cannot be preserved by hiding.

There was a wonderful tension in that standoff behind the internet-bar. Not-Sarkasian held John hostage. Derek held that unknown little girl. Non-Sarkasian told us that she wasn't his kid. With Derek rather ambiguously responding, "Not mine either." In that moment, he was talking about both the children in the ally. Neither of them was his child.

Yet, as they stood there at the proverbial Mexican standoff, Derek covered the little girl’s eyes. As if by preventing her from seeing him shoot non-Sarkasian, who could well be her father, he could somehow protect her from the knowledge of that moment. He did it all the same.

After non-Sarkasian fell, we had our non-Pieta. Sarah held her son, who seemed to realize that Terminators and Judgment Day aren’t the only things he has to worry about.

Silent Chola drove them back to their home. Cameron first asked the silent girl if she would have to kill her now too. Then Cameron handed Chola a gun, sparse protection in a world where there is no safety.

Ellison was just starting to understand that as he discussed Kester with Agent Simpson. Kester looked like Lazlo, but the blood did not match. Greta listed off all the ways that Lazlo had to be Kester. Kester/Lazlo’s actions made no sense, because they didn’t know the goal. Ellison wondered what kind of monster Lazlo/Kester must be, and Greta told him that he knew full well that some men are monsters.

As they prepared to go face that monster, the long night had moved into day, John’s day. A day he now looked to spend cracking Sarkasian’s files.

In that morning after a sleepless night, Derek wanted to celebrate John’s birthday, because “things to celebrate should be celebrated.” Derek knew as John did, anything could happen. The end could be in four years or four seconds.

Derek knew it was John’s birthday, because he’d celebrated John’s 30th with him. Thirty is another one of those time markers. It was another coming of age for John that had both happened and not yet happened. Derek offered to buy John a beer, but the drunk as a skunk John was in the future. This John was only sixteen, not yet twenty-one.

So they went to the park for sweet child’s ice cream, and Derek rather awkwardly said/asked that Sarah has never killed anyone. She had murder in the windows to her soul, her eyes, but her heart was still pure.

They sat on that sunshine-bright park bench, and Derek talked about doing anything to keep the future from burning this innocent grass.

Then we had one of the most heart-wrenching moments of the season. After John had spent all season looking for a father figure, to know his dead-hero- father, there he was. Little Kyle, at five years old, throwing a baseball with his older brother in a golden California morning, back when the day was still young.

Derek knew Kyle was John’s father, because, “Every time I look at you, I see him.” This was a statement that made me want to go back and re-watch with that knowledge in mind. When Derek stood in the grass and asked Sarah about his brother, he knew. When John talked about foster homes and couch surfing, Derek was looking at John and seeing his lost little brother’s face. It made me wonder when did Derek first see John in the past and understand the Moebius strip of it all.

I missed having that moment of revelation, but in a series and an episode where so much identity was obscured, I loved the idea that Derek got to be perceptive in the face of the truth. What an excellent birthday present.

From the sylvan moment, we shifted to the thing that must be protected against. Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around” played and we viewers knew that Agent Ellison and Agent Simpson had no idea what they were in for.

Those nameless FBI busted down the door and what followed was one of the most abstract and horribly beautiful fight scenes that I’ve ever “not” seen.

I realize that we don’t see the battle because of the costs involved, but having the viewer first fall with an agent into the pool, and then be submerged as agents fell was stunning. Ellison’s frantic commands to fall back, came through the comforting cool, but it was all very much too late. Ellison had wondered what kind of monster Kester/Lazlo was. Ignorance was no protection.

Water is generally symbolic of life, the fountain of youth and all that. The end of the primordial comes with splitting of the waters. Those mythological all father gods that I mentioned earlier (Marduk, Zeus, and Odin, oh my), they slew the dragons, fathers, or giants that came before. They split the waters and created the lands.

Fire is so often associated with the end. As Johnny Cash told us, “It's Alpha's and Omega's Kingdom come.” And fire/hell will follow after that pale horse.

With the blood of the end drenching the waters of Alpha, the blue pool stained red and black. This was water that filtering through a cloth would not cleanse.

As the Man in Black broke off his song, we panned up another man in black, Cromartie. His face wore the marks of the fight, but he was full of oh so Terminator calm. Ellison, man of the book that he is, prayed in the face of such implacable death. For as the song goes, “Whoever is righteous, let him be righteous still.”

As to what Cromartie thought, or why he didn’t kill Ellison, there are a thousand possibilities of speculation.

In the face of those possibilities, Sarah began her closing monologue. Having opened with the inevitable loss of the innocence of her child, she closed with a description of “Lord of the Flies.” She described a boy, Simon, who wept at the death of a pig, which symbolized the end of innocence and the darkness of men’s hearts. What she did not relate was that Simon, returning to his friends, was mistaken for a monster in the dark and killed by his friends in their slide into chaos.^***

As Cromartie calmly walked away, Charley arrived having heard a broadcast about the FBI raid. Charley and Ellison looked at each over the body of poor Agent Geta (Gretel) and they both finally truly understood the face of the monster.

With the ending monologue already read, there was an additional “make a finale” scene.

Sarah stood behind John as he decrypted. He didn’t tell her what Derek knew. He only told her that Derek had remained at the park.

Now John wanted to push forward and it was Sarah clearly delineating the difference between their mission and their lives. “Things to celebrate should be celebrated.” As they discussed going out to dinner, they were a trip wire close to Death’s pale horse.

Sarkasian’s code cracked and they looked at a series of faces. They saw Sarah’s face, a stranger, and Dimitri, and knew that someone else was looking for the Turk. They realized that Sarkasian had been sitting in plain sight all along. I wonder if even his men know.

Cameron, on her cake-drive mission, saw a stranger walk away. It was only as he looked back and she turned the car key, that she recognized the clerk. She didn’t know his significance. Although, I would also imagine that the car blowing up around her was a give away. As Sarah and John reacted the explosion, I wondered that most important of all questions. How can Cameron go to the prom if she has no skin?

Source  
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

**http://www.htmlbible.com/kjv30/B66C006.htm  
http://lyrics.rockmagic.net/lyrics/johnny_cash/american_iv_the_man_comes_around_2002.html#01  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ni%C3%B1os_H%C3%A9roes

*** http://www.pantheon.org/articles/t/tiamat.html  
http://www.pantheon.org/articles/z/zeus.html  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odin

^* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican-American_War  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Ninos_Heroes  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapultepec_Castle

^**http://www.jackbloodforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=13996  
http://www.answers.com/bb/bbsearch.jsp?Q=did%20the%20whigs%20opposed%20the%20mexican%20american%20war

^***http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/flies/summary.html

**Author's Note:**

> If after reading my fiction here, you would like to read more about me and my writing check out my profile.


End file.
